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NASA Spacecraft Skims Asteroid Surface to Capture Sample

VOA News

   A spacecraft from the U.S. space agency NASA briefly touched an
   asteroid Tuesday on a mission to collect dust and pebbles to bring back
   to Earth.

   The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft -- an acronym for Origins, Spectral
   Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer --
   carried out the operation on the asteroid Bennu located about 321
   million kilometers from Earth.

   NASA said telemetry data from the spacecraft indicated the mission went
   as expected, but that scientists will need a week to confirm how much
   material the spacecraft was able to collect.

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