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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We mentioned yesterday the Japanese Hayabusa2 probe was set to return its samples to Earth. That sample return happened near Woomera in Australia and went perfectly. JAXA has announced the capsule ...

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 ...

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 ...

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its ...