Japan's mission to bring asteroid dust back to Earth has succeeded. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed on 14 December that a capsule from spacecraft Hayabusa2, which landed in an Australian desert last week, contained black grains from asteroid Ryugu.
"The confirmation of sample is a very important milestone for us and for JAXA," says Yuichi Tsuda, project manager for the mission at JAXA, in Sagamihara.
"The samples containing precious asteroid material will provide scientists with key information about the formation of the Solar System," says Ed Kruzins, director of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which helped to track the spacecraft and its encounter with Ryugu.
In case you are keeping track:
Hayabusa-2: Pieces of an asteroid found inside space capsule - BBC News
.css-14iz86j-BoldText{font-weight:bold;} Scientists have been greeted by the sight of jet black chunks of rock and soil from an asteroid after opening a capsule that returned from deep space a week ago.
It's the first significant sample of material to be delivered to Earth from a space rock and was grabbed last year by Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft.
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Hayabusa-2 reached the object in June 2018; it is believed to be one of the building blocks left over from the formation of the Solar System.
We're coming for the asteroids. Are the asteroids coming for us? | Astronomy.com
For robotic probes, the list started in the same place but kept going: inward to Mercury and the Sun itself, outward past Neptune and Pluto . For the most part, though, we've ignored the other 99.9999% of the objects in the inner solar system: the asteroids. There are, by current estimates, nearly two million asteroids more than a kilometer in diameter.
That's about to change: There currently eight dedicated asteroid missions underway or in development (nine if you include MMX , a Japanese mission to Mars's inner moon, Phobos, which might be a captured asteroid). Hayabusa2 is about to swing past Earth next week, dropping of samples of asteroid Ryugu over Australia. OSIRIS-REx will follow behind with a larger cache of rocks that it recently collected from another small asteroid, Bennu.
Scientists thrilled with asteroid treasure returned by Japanese spacecraft – Spaceflight Now
Japanese space agency officials said Tuesday they found a “large number” of pitch black rock and dust particles after opening a capsule returned to Earth earlier this month by the Hayabusa 2 mission, giving eager scientists their first significant specimens ever brought back from an asteroid.
Scientists working inside a super-clean laboratory in Sagamihara, Japan, have opened the first of three sample collection chambers inside Hayabusa 2’s return capsule, beginning the process of analyzing the material in search of fresh insights into the history of the solar system.
In case you are keeping track:
Losing Arecibo's giant dish leaves humans more vulnerable to space rocks, scientists say | Space
Ignorance may feel like bliss, but preparedness offers better odds of surviving what is to come. And when it comes to planetary defense , ignorance just became a bit more inevitable.
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"There's been statements in the media that, 'Oh we have other systems that can kind of replace what Arecibo is doing,' and I don't think that's true," Anne Virkki, who leads the planetary radar team at Arecibo Observatory, told Space.com. "It's not obsolete and it's not easily replaceable by other existing facilities and instruments."
Building a Shock Classification Scheme for Meteorites from Asteroid Vesta | Planetary News
Evidence for impact events can be found in the mineralogy and appearance of lunar samples and meteorites that originate from other bodies in the solar system. This shock metamorphism is ubiquitous in meteorites from asteroids, which, as airless bodies, are more susceptible to impact effects than planets that have protective atmospheres.
Recently, Rei Kanemaru of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI (Japan), and colleagues combined optical and spectroscopic observations of sixteen weakly shocked eucrites, differentiated meteorites thought to form via volcanic processes and originate from the asteroid Vesta, to create a classification scheme to describe the shock metamorphic effects they observed.
Near-Earth Asteroid Turns Out to Be Surveyor 2 Centaur Rocket Booster - autoevolution
Japan space agency confirms asteroid soil inside capsule - ABC News
TOKYO -- Japan's space agency said Monday it has confirmed the presence of black soil samples inside a capsule that the spacecraft Hayabusa2 brought back from a distant asteroid last week.
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The samples were gathered from touchdowns that Hayabusa2 made last year on Ryugu, more than 300 million kilometers (190 million miles) from Earth. The landings were more difficult than expected because of the asteroid's extremely rocky surface.
The first landing collected samples from Ryugu's surface and the second from underground. Each was stored separately.
Happening on Twitter
Japan's mission to bring asteroid dust back to Earth has succeeded. https://t.co/5TmHCyhhuO sciam (from New York City) Tue Dec 15 21:15:00 +0000 2020
Black 'sand-like' asteroid #dust found in box from Japan #probe https://t.co/WEBDcajBYz physorg_com Mon Dec 14 14:09:29 +0000 2020
Scientists 'speechless' after finding black sand-like dust and gas samples from distant asteroid inside capsule https://t.co/hj1LVZUC0T MailOnline Tue Dec 15 12:29:36 +0000 2020
Black "sand-like" asteroid dust found in box from #Japan probe https://t.co/4u4NzhXIMe CGTNOfficial (from Beijing, China) Tue Dec 15 04:20:00 +0000 2020
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