https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-osiris-rex-seeks-to-grab-a-piece-of-asteroid-bennu/

On the other side of the sun, an interplanetary heist is afoot. Next week NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will make a daring attempt to steal samples from the surface of an asteroid, dodging giant boulders and other hazards in the process. If all goes well, it will then make the long journey back home, returning the largest amount of extraterrestrial material to Earth from a nonlunar mission in history. Its precious cargo of otherworldly rocks could hold answers to long-standing questions about our cosmic origins. “We hope to get material that will inform us about the first phase of our solar system’s formation,” says Patrick Michel of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France.

The roughly $1-billion OSIRIS-REx was launched back in 2016 on a mission to the asteroid Bennu, which has an orbit slightly larger than Earth’s. Equipped with an extendable armlike instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), the primary goal of the spacecraft is to descend to Bennu’s surface and scoop up a sizable amount of sample, up to two kilograms, before returning to Earth. The only previous successful asteroid-sample-return mission, Japan’s Hayabusa, returned just a few micrograms in 2010. Its successor, Hayabusa2, is scheduled to drop off a new sample in December but with only up to a gram onboard.