Tokyo – It looks like small pieces of charcoal, but the samples collected from a planet on Earth by a Japanese spacecraft and ground samples were hardly disappointing.
Samples of Japanese space officials described on Thursday are as large as 0.4 inches and are hard rock, not breaking when taken or poured into another container. Small black, sandy granules that were collected in the spacecraft and returned separately last week.
Last year’s Haibusa 2 spacecraft found two sets of samples at two locations on the asteroid Ryugu more than 190 million miles from Earth. It was launched from space at the target of the Australian outback, and samples were brought to Japan in early December.
The sandy granules described last week by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency were the first spacecraft to land in April 2019.
By JAXA AP
There were large pieces from the bin allotted for the second touchdown on Rayugu, said Tomohiro Usui, a scientist at Space Materials.
To obtain a second set of specimens in July last year, Haibusa 2 left the effective one to blast beneath the planet’s surface, collecting material from the crater so that it would not be affected by space radiation and other environmental factors.
Usui said the size difference indicates the different hardness of the bedrock on the asteroid. “One possibility is that the location of the second touchdown was a hard bedrock and large particles broke and entered the box.”
JX will continue preliminary testing of asteroid samples before a full study next year.
By JAXA AP
Scientists hope the samples will provide an understanding of the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.
Following the study in Japan, some samples will be shared with NASA and other international space agencies for additional research.
Meanwhile, Haibusa 2, another small and distant asteroid, is on an 11-year expedition in 1998KY26, trying to study the defense potential against a meteorite that could fly to Earth.
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