What's in an asteroid?

Via Ars Technica, this fun news: 

When the spacecraft departed the roughly 1,600-foot-wide (500-meter) asteroid Bennu in 2020, engineers estimated the probe had gathered around 250 grams, or 8.8 ounces, of specimens from Bennu's porous surface. The spacecraft sampled the asteroid by extending a robotic arm out in front of it, then essentially pogoing off the surface, only contacting Bennu for a few seconds. When it touched the asteroid, the spacecraft released a burst of gas to funnel loose rocks into a collection chamber shaped like an air filter on the end of the robot arm. This device is called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM.

Scientists discovered the collection chamber's door was wedged open with larger rocky material, with some fragments of rock leaking out into space, so they decided to quickly stow the sampling device inside the return capsule to avoid losing more material. That led some scientists on the OSIRIS-REx team to wonder whether the spacecraft might come back to Earth with even more than the 250-gram estimate, which was four times the minimum requirement for mission success.

Researchers likely won't know for sure how much material OSIRIS-REx brought home until next month. That will require the lab team in Houston to remove the TAGSAM sampling mechanism from its restraint inside the canister, which protected it for the journey back to Earth like a nested doll. Then they will open up the device and hopefully find larger chunks of rock. All of this should happen in the next couple of weeks.

There is always that moment when you're taking the flask off the rotovap, or you're taking the lid off the plant sample, and you get this news: 

“We opened up the canister today, and we did see that there is some black dust-like material that's visible," Lauretta said Tuesday. "We're hoping that's from Bennu. We expect that we'll be collecting a portion of that tomorrow morning, and that'll go right into laboratories."

"This is our first glimpse of what we might have," said Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission's principal investigator. "There's good indication that we might have sample." 

Best wishes to the OSIRIS team, and it will be really cool to see what chemicals are a part of asteroids.