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By Paul Rincon BBC Science Editor
A recovery team in Australia has found a space capsule carrying the first large amounts of rock from an asteroid.
An artist’s rendering of the separation of a capsule from the Hayabusa-2 space probe, which contains a sample collected from the asteroid Ryugu.
Photo: AFP / JAXA / Jiji Press
The capsule, which contains material from a space rock called Ryugu, parachuted down near Woomera in South Australia.
The samples were originally collected by a Japanese spacecraft called Hayabusa-2, which spent more than a year investigating the object.
The container detached itself from Hayabusa-2 and then entered Earth’s atmosphere.
Hayabusa-2’s official Twitter account reported that the capsule and its parachute had been found at 19:47 GMT.
Earlier on Saturday, cameras captured the capsule as a dazzling fireball streaking through Australia’s Coober Pedy region.
Screaming toward Earth at 11 km / s, it deployed parachutes to slow its descent. The capsule then began transmitting a beacon with information about its position.
The spacecraft landed on the wide range of Woomera, operated by the Royal Australian Air Force.
At around 18:07 GMT, the recovery team identified where the capsule had landed. A helicopter, equipped with an antenna to pick up the beacon, took to the air shortly after to search for the container.
WHY, HELLO SAMPLE CAPSULE! ☄️
The capsule weighs about 16 kg and is about 40 x 20 cm in size. The light comes from the heat shield, which should have reached temperatures of around 3000 ° C during atmospheric reentry, protecting the sample from such insane temperatures. pic.twitter.com/7VqBeRk5KE
– Elizabeth Tasker (@girlandkat) December 5, 2020
The capsule will now be taken to a “rapid inspection facility” for inspection before being flown to Japan.
The 16 kg container will be transported to a holding chamber at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) in Sagamihara for analysis and storage.
The mission planned to collect a sample of more than 100 mg from the asteroid Ryugu.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, Queen’s University Belfast, said the show “would reveal a great deal, not only about the history of the Solar System, but also about these particular objects.”
Asteroids are essentially building materials left over from the formation of the Solar System. They are made of the same material that was used to build worlds like Earth, but they avoided being incorporated into the planets.
“Having samples of an asteroid like Ryugu will be really exciting for our field. We think Ryugu is made up of super old rocks that will tell us how the Solar System formed,” said Professor Sara Russell, leader of the planetary materials group in London. Natural History Museum, he told BBC News.
Studying samples taken from Ryugu could tell us how water and the ingredients for life got to the early Earth.
Comets were long thought to carry much of Earth’s water in the early days of the Solar System. Alan Fitzsimmons said that the chemical profile of water in comets was sometimes different from the profile of water in our planet’s oceans.
However, the composition of the water of some asteroids in the outer Solar System is much more similar. Ryugu probably originated in this cold zone, before migrating to its current orbit, closer to Earth.
“It may be that we have been looking for comets all this time to bring water to Earth in the early Solar System. Perhaps we should have been looking a little closer to home, at these primitive but quite rocky asteroids,” said Professor Fitzsimmons. BBC News.
“In fact, that is something that will be analyzed very carefully in these Ryugu samples.”
– BBC
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