Won't the extra weight require a change in earth re-entry fuel calculation etc. ? Without knowing the exact change in weight, they are going to be firing in the dark, as it were.
It's not enough to make a difference either way around it. The sample return container could be filled to the brim with pure osmium or iridium and would make it through the atmosphere just fine.
The scientists are mostly worried because they want as much of the sample as they can possibly get, and they're a little worried about closing the sample container - if there's a rock that gets stuck somewhere, the container might not seal shut and then they've got a real bad problem they've gotta contend with.
It's 2020, they don't want to jinx it, just shut it up in the container and wait for the time capsule to arrive in 2023.
I don't know that much, but I suppose they will do a burn and then some corrections. If mass difference is big enough to be detectable for reentry, it will be detectable when they are going back to earth.
A key difference is that spinning the full satellite with the arm extended and measuring the center of rotation measures the mass of the samples collected regardless of the thrusters/reaction wheels.
Measuring the trajectory of the reentry vehicle gives a parameter that can be used to estimate the sample mass assuming nominal thrust values, but you can't distinguish between an underperforming or overperforming rocket engine and heavier or lighter samples. This ambiguity doesn't really matter for the purposes of burn correction - you need to get to the correct reentry trajectory no matter what caused the deviation - but your sample mass estimate may be off.
I don't think there's a whole lot of utility in knowing the sample mass, as long as you've got enough (and they've definitely got enough!), it would just help satiate the curiosity of the scientists and engineers who otherwise have to wait a few more years to see their results.
That makes me wonder: how is it possible to even determine what the correction should be? Space is vast, how do they determine the position of a microscopic vessel precisely enough to know how much to burn?
Multiple correction burns along the way. For equivalent burns, the later along the trajectory the burn, the smaller its net effect on final position. So it's a series of increasingly better approximations.
Try it in ksp. It's quite illuminating to plan your burns and see their effect graphically and build an intuition for celestial mechanics and astrogation.
The primary instrument is probably a star tracker. It's possible to position yourself within the galaxy to a very high degree of accuracy by looking at changes in relative position of stars and planets which have a known "position" (really orbits).
