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The Japanese space agency’s remarkable Hayabusa2 mission will deliver the second artificially collected sample of asteroid material on Sunday when a return capsule falls to Earth within range of the Woomera rocket in South Australia.
The Hayabusa2 probe has made a 6 billion kilometer and 30 billion yen ($ 388 million) round trip to an asteroid called Ryugu, which began six years ago in December 2014. After landing on Ryugu twice Last year, the spacecraft began its return journey to drop a capsule protected by a heat shield to deliver its payload.
While the capsule is swiftly carried away for analysis of its precious contents, the vehicle that brought it will continue to sail into space, meeting asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.
Back on the asteroid Ryugu, the mission has left a new archaeological site strewn across the surface consisting of four rovers, three craters, a chamber, an impactor, and four reflective markers. These are 10cm silver subspherical balls imprinted with a grid pattern that serve as orientation beacons in an unknown land.
In 2018, the Hibou, Owl, and Mascot rovers landed on Ryugu’s surface. Armed with cameras and other instruments, their task was to study the terrain of the 1 km asteroid.
We’re used to slow-moving, robust-wheeled planetary rovers like Curiosity on Mars and Yutu 2 on the Moon, but Hayabusa’s rovers used a unique mechanism to jump across the surface like tiny spiders with solar panels. Its 16 stubby legs probably pierced the surface with each leap.
A fourth rover, Minerva II-2, did not wake up after hibernation on the way to Ryugu. It was used to make gravitational measurements and then crashed into the surface.
These artifacts tell the story of a very busy period of engagement with the asteroid during 2018-2019, when it was measured, filmed, punctured and punctured, ending with a “biopsy” when the Hayabusa2 main spacecraft fired a device under Ryugu’s skin and removed 1 g of material. This may not sound like much, but it is a wealth compared to the mere 1,500 grains of dust that the Hayabusa 1 precursor mission sent from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010.
Now Ryugu is still and silent again: the rovers have run out of power and have stopped jumping. The shadow of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft is no longer even visible as it circles the tiny asteroid. Nothing moves on the surface.
However, the asteroid is no longer a blank rock: the mission allowed us to name places in the landscape of this mini-world. Ryugu itself is the name of a mythical underwater palace in Japanese folklore. The fairy tales provided the theme of 13 craters and other features. Unofficially, Mascot’s landing site became known as Alice’s Wonderland.
There are a surprising number of human traces scattered throughout these tiny bodies in the solar system.
Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko is home to the remains of the Rosetta and Philae ships of the European Space Agency. The Near Shoemaker probe landed on asteroid 433 Eros in 2001 after a year of making observations from orbit. Nasa’s Dawn is orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres, beyond Mars in the main asteroid belt. Hayabusa 1 left touchdown marks at Itokawa, as well as a goal marker; but it lost its Minerva lander, which is now orbiting the Sun. On the asteroid Bennu, there is a small depression smoothed out like a dune explosion where Osiris Rex zoomed in to capture particles. We will not recover this sample until 2023.
Meanwhile, Hayabusa2 is about to open another window into the early history of the solar system and the big question: how life originated.
Did life evolve on Earth from primordial slime, or was it delivered on the natural spacecraft we know as comets, asteroids, and meteorites?
It’s easy to think that the rest of the solar system is barren compared to the vitality of the Earth with its blue oceans and virulent vegetation, but every new mission beyond our terrarium in the last decade has shown that water is much more abundant than what we thought.
And where there is water, there is the potential for life, particularly if we also find complex “prebiotic” molecules. Jaxa focused on Ryugu because it is rich in carbonaceous compounds and can tell us something about its distribution.
Planetary protection guidelines set conditions on missions to places where life could be present to avoid polluting or killing potential neighbors hiding in subglacial or subglacial oceans.
Perhaps we should not see ourselves as separate from this process, but as part of it.
“Panspermia” is the theory that life is everywhere. Future space archaeologists or astrobiologists may view discarded human artifacts in the solar system as interplanetary travelers distributing terrestrial materials, both living and non-living, in the same way as meteorites.
Humans could be the agents of nonhuman life colonizing ecological niches on other worlds, our own great plans for multiplanetary occupation abandoned as our flimsy bodies are far less adaptable than those more experienced space travelers, microbes.
When Hayabusa2’s return capsule hits the red sands of Woomera to be greeted with enthusiasm by the waiting teams of scientists, we will have another small piece to the puzzle of life, the universe and everything.
