Harold Connolly Jr.

That's a lot.

It's a lot.

Yeah, great questions from both of you.

First of all, Bennu is what we call a rubble pile asteroid.

So it's literally an asteroid made up of accumulation of large boulders and teeny tiny little grains.

And it rotates around its own axis in 4.2 hours.

Actually, it rotates retrograde, which means opposite than what we normally would think.

It rotates.

And all the information we had, we had designed originally the spacecraft for big ponds on the surface of really fine-grained material.

You know, we're talking about less than an inch size material because our data, our science showed us that there should be a lot of it.

We got there, we screamed because there were boulders 11 stories high.

And it wasn't quite what we expected.

And, you know, the problem is when you fly down to the surface of the asteroid, you may not come back out the same way either.

So there's challenges with the navigation that you have to think about.

And to get to your questions and your comments here, we had designed the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism to basically just touch the surface, as Neil said, and we fire some nitrogen gas, and it basically fluidizes or moves the gravel up, and then it gets collected into this little sort of reverse mechanism.

hoover or vacuum head, and then we would pull back.

The autonomous spacecraft pulls back from the surface.

But what happened was, is we went in 48 centimeters, you know, length of an arm almost, down into the surface of the asteroid, which wasn't, you know, went right through it.

Which we did not really expect.

Some folks on the mission will say, well, we had some models that showed it could be, but yeah, okay, it could be.