Piercing tool for a Moon sample container

A piercing tool built by ESA is set to open a Moon soil container from Apollo 17 that has gone untouched for nearly 50 years.

The gas extraction experiment is part of the larger Apollo Next-Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) programme that coordinates the analysis of pristine Moon samples from the Apollo era. And for the first time ever, ESA is involved in the opening of soil returned from the Moon.