Comment Re:So ... custom tools? (Score 1) 47
One could have made a custom tool from a very specific well-known material that has been analyzed and documented exceptionally well beforehand. With that, it'd be possible to exclude this specific material from the analysis and by weighing it very precisely before and after use, we would even know exactly how many micro or nanograms of the tool material should be there.
And I guess they did just that, but probably not to a spec that's strong enough or large enough to produce the forces needed to open the damn thing.
And despite not being a scientist, I do know that stainless steel, or any steel in general, is highly UNsuitable to operations in unknown substances that could potentially be corrosive or flammable or magnetic etc.
Something that contains any amount of iron or nickel is very difficult to not be at least slightly magnetic, and if the sample contains magnetic dust, it could be attracted or disturbed by the magnetism of the tool. Steel is always a mix of several elements, and probably has iron and carbon in it, which is always a target for oxidation and thus has a higher chance of one of the elements starting a chemical reaction or becoming degraded by whatever is in the sample. Iron and steel have properties highly dependent on their internal molecular structure, which makes the entire thing (slightly) unpredictable or at least it's expensive to have it be very uniform in all its properties. And above all, steel is hard and throws sparks when impacted, throwing minuscule amounts of burning metal into the sample or its surroundings that can cause whatever chemical reaction with it, even explosions or fire, if the material is gaseous or finely powdered.
Anyone who works with gaseous substances or in flammable / explosive environments will never touch a steel or iron tool. All their tools are made of special beryllium-copper or aluminum-bronze alloys that are far less brittle and will not produce sparks or tiny fragments on impact, but deform or dent instead. These tools don't last nearly as long for these reasons.
Maybe they had a very good reason for using steel that we don't know or the alternative materials for tools had bigger drawbacks.