This spherical container has been engineered to house the most scientifically valuable cargo imaginable: samples brought back from the Red Planet. Still probably many years in the future and most ...

Click to open image viewer. All of the Apollo lunar landing missions were equipped with containers specially designed to isolate small rock or soil samples from possible contamination during transfer ...

NASA has collected a small amount of the rock and dust sample that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back from the asteroid Bennu. However, it is having a bit of trouble accessing the rest. That's ...

You’d think grabbing a scoop of dirt off an orbiting space rock and then delivering it back to Earth would be the most complicated part of an asteroid sample collection mission, but the real challenge ...

A mission to return samples from the planet Mars is still many years away and, officially, not on the calendar. That hasn't stopped the ESA from producing a proof-of-concept prototype of the ...

NASA scientists successfully brought an asteroid sample back to Earth in September, making them the first U.S. space agency to do so. All they have to do now is figure out how to open the Touch-and-Go ...

In September, fragments of a near-Earth asteroid were carefully dropped off in the Utah desert. The space rocks hold clues to the origin of the solar system and can possibly answer crucial questions ...

Click to open image viewer. The Apollo Lunar Sample Return Container (ALSRC) was an aluminum box with a triple seal. It was used on Apollo lunar landing missions to preserve a lunar-like vacuum around ...

Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts brought back to Earth a total of nine containers of moon material that were sealed on the lunar surface. Two of the larger sealed samples were collected by ...

It took OSIRIS-REx years to reach the asteroid Bennu, scoop up a sample, and return it to Earth. While NASA scientists were anxious to get a look at the sample when the spacecraft dropped it off in ...

NASA revealed its OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample earlier this month as planned, but something was missing. We got preliminary material analysis and images of the cosmic pebbles scattered around the top of ...