Nicely done, Phil! I take it the title and heading font is from the template because I couldn't find a way to edit the formatting of those.

Right. I didn't change anything in the template.

Phil

"The curation team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston has released the OSIRIS-REx sample catalog detailing the small rocks and dust that scientists around the globe can request for their research."
https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/
https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/osirisrex/index.cfm# - catalog
https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/osirisrex/aiva...ges_listing.cfm - some pictures

It looks like the largest piece in the photographed sample - 3.5 cm long in my opinion.
And other interesting particles.

And another frame of the sample, which looks almost like a close-up view of the surface of Bennu - obviously not on the same scale, but considering the fractal structure of the asteroid, the view is quite similar...

There's a publication up:
Asteroid (101955) Bennu in the Laboratory: Properties of the Sample Collected by OSIRIS-REx

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12536

Thanks for this information.
A very interesting publication - studies like this one are, in fact, the most valuable fruit generated by automatic interplanetary missions.

For convenience, I am only adding a direct link to the PDF of the entire publication (including images): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.12536

There's a nice reference in that scientific preprint to a reconstruction analysis of the EDL at NTRS

Things weren't quite as complicated as I speculated back in (post 116), as there had been a press statement about altitude that was spurious*. No need now, I think, to invoke the dynamic pressure I wondered about.

The lines to the main deploy/drogue release pyro and the drogue deploy mortar were switched.

The first firing was 14 seconds after a g-trigger (downgoing 3g), the second firing was to be 363 seconds after that trigger, or when a pressure sensor saw 10,000ft above sea level, whichever condition was met first.

The first firing effectively caused nothing to happen, since both drogue and main were still buttoned up in the capsule, except the line from drogue to capsule was severed.

The capsule was then falling faster than planned (no drogue!) and tumbling, until the pressure trigger fired (only 212 seconds after the g-trigger). Mortar fired throwing out the drogue which pulled out the main as it was dragged away. Although the main deployed at a higher dynamic pressure than intended (and at a who-knows-what attitude), it fortunately did so safely.

Kudos to the team for writing up these details so they can be learned from.

Ralph

(*Francis Crick : "Any theory that fits all the facts will be wrong, because some of the facts will be wrong")

Summary of LPSC abstracts from back in March:

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2024/...?session_no=253