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Scientists in Japan said they were astonished when they saw how much asteroid dust was inside a capsule delivered by the Hayabusa-2 space probe.
The Japanese probe collected surface dust and pristine material last year from the asteroid Ryugu, some 300 million kilometers away, during two daring phases of its six-year mission.
This month, it dropped a capsule containing the samples, which created a fireball as it entered Earth’s atmosphere and landed in the Australian desert before being transported to Japan.
Scientists from Japan’s Jaxa space agency removed the screws from the capsule’s inner container on Tuesday, after finding a small amount of asteroid dust in the outer shell.
“When we actually opened it, I was speechless. It was more than we expected and there was so much that I was really impressed, ”said Jaxa scientist Hirotaka Sawada. “They were not fine particles like dust, but there were a lot of samples that were several millimeters wide.”
Scientists hope the material will shed light on the formation of the universe and perhaps offer clues to how life began on Earth.
They have not yet revealed whether the material inside is equal to, or perhaps even more, than the 0.1 gram they had said they hoped to discover.
Seiichiro Watanabe, a Hayabusa project scientist and professor at Nagoya University, said he was nonetheless excited. “There’s a lot [of samples] and they seem to contain a lot of organic matter, ”he said. “So I hope we can find out a lot about how organic substances have developed in Ryugu’s parent body.”
Half of the Hayabusa-2 samples will be shared between Jaxa, the US space agency Nasa and other international organizations. The rest will be saved for future study as advances in analytical technology are made.
But work is not done for the probe, which will now begin an extended mission targeting two new asteroids.
