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Japan recovers the earliest known material: sand from an asteroid

2020-12-16T00:16:40.470Z


The 'Hayabusa 2' probe sends soil from a body that has remained virgin since the dawn of the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago, to Earth


One of the capsules with material from the asteroid Ryugu.JAXA

The Japanese space agency has confirmed that its

Hayabusa 2

space probe

has brought back samples from the asteroid Ryugu, which orbits between Mars and Earth at a minimum distance of almost 100,000 kilometers.

Ryugu is like a time capsule that has remained largely intact since the formation of the solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago.

The grains of black earth that can be seen in the probe's collection capsule are a virgin material impossible to find on Earth and that can clarify how the planets formed.

This is the second time that the Japanese have recovered material from an asteroid, but this is the first time that they have obtained significant amounts of soil.

"A large quantity of particles" has been recovered from one of the sample deposits sent by the probe, the Japanese space agency has confirmed in a statement.

After a trip to Ryugu that began in 2014, the probe began to orbit this small world - less than a kilometer in diameter.

Since then the spacecraft has been prodding the asteroid with a "robotic horn" designed to collect samples from both the surface and its interior, which it has accessed by firing metal projectiles to open craters.

The

Hayabusa 2

is much more advanced than its predecessor and has also left on the comet several exploration robots with built-in cameras that have shown for the first time what the surface appearance of this dark and almost spherical body.

The probe launched the hermetic capsules with the samples collected during its last closest approach to Earth into space.

After reentry into the atmosphere, the cargo landed in Woomera, South Australia, last week, where it was located and rushed to Japan.

The samples collected by this probe will allow a detailed analysis of the material from which an asteroid is made, explains Luisa Lara, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia.

"The

Hayabusa 1

probe

[launched in 2003] was the first to bring back samples from an asteroid, but it collected only 1,500 grains" of microscopic dimensions.

"This time the

Hayabusa 2

has brought much more material of different sizes and, above all, from the inner and intact layers of this body," he says.

In 1999 NASA's

Stardust

mission made a flyby of Comet Wild 2 and trapped part of its wake thanks to a sticky gel that it brought back to Earth in 2004. No other robotic spacecraft has visited another body and brought back samples, although the US and China are already competing to be the first to do so with samples from the Moon and Mars.

Thanks to this mission, it will be possible to study for the first time “the most primitive material” ever analyzed, which will be able to answer whether water and compounds fundamental for life reached Earth from space aboard asteroids like this one, explains Lara.

Further, the astrophysicist points out that this type of scientific mission may be the prelude to other commercial missions that visit the Moon or asteroids to exploit them as a mining resource.

10% of the collected material will be sent to the US space agency by the end of next year in exchange for samples from the asteroid Bennu, which NASA hopes to recover with its Osiris-Rex probe in 2023, according to

Nature

.

Another 15% will be made available to the international scientific community and the remaining 40% will be preserved in Japan.

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Source: elparis

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