⁍ The robotic arm of the probe, OSIRIS-REx, on Tuesday kicked up a debris cloud of rocks on Bennu.

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⁍ Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago.

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⁍ A sample could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.

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– “Time is of the essence.” So says NASA’s associate administrator for science after the agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe managed to collect so much material from an asteroid that a rock had to be wedged into the container door to allow it to spill back out into space, reports Reuters. The $800 million probe launched Tuesday to collect a sample from the Bennu asteroid, which scientists say could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth. But images of the spacecraft’s collection head beamed back to ground control revealed it had caught more material than scientists anticipated and was spewing an excess of flaky asteroid rocks into space. The leakage had the OSIRIS-REx mission team scrambling to stow the collection device to prevent additional spillage. NASA will skip their chance to measure how much material they collected as originally planned and proceed to the stow phase, a fragile process of tucking the sample collection container in a safe position within the spacecraft without jostling out more valuable material. The troubleshooting also led mission leaders to forgo any more chances of redoing a collection attempt and instead commit to begin the spacecraft’s return to Earth next March. But with the door lodged open by a rock and the ‘concerning’ images of sample spillage, ‘we’re almost the victim of our own success here,’ says OSIRIS-REx principle investigator Dante Lauretta. Japan is the only other country to have accomplished such a feat.