"We are here to announce today that we've successfully completed that operation," said Rich Burns, the mission's project manager. On Thursday, Nasa said it had been able a day earlier to maneuver the robotic arm holding the leaking particles to a storage capsule near the center of the spacecraft, drop off the sample and close the capsule's lid. "My heart breaks for loss of sample," said Dante Lauretta, the mission's chief scientist, but he noted that they had successfully stowed hundreds of grams (several ounces) of fragments, far in excess of their minimum goal. "Now we can look forward to receiving the sample here on Earth and opening up that capsule," he said. Osiris-Rex is set to come home in September 2023, hopefully with the largest sample returned from space since the Apollo era.

Source: Dhaka Tribune October 30, 2020 12:56 UTC