TOKYO (AP) – It looks like small fragments of coal, but soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing.
The samples of Japanese space officials described on Thursday are up to 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) and are hard to break, they do not break when picked up or poured into another container. The smaller black and sandy granules that the probe collected and returned separately were described last week.
Last year, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft received the two sets of samples from two locations on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 300 million kilometers (190 million miles) from Earth. They escaped from space on a target in the Australian Outback, and the samples were brought to Japan in early December.
The sand granules described by the Japanese aerospace exploration agency last week come from the spacecraft’s first touchdown in April 2019.
The larger fragments come from the compartment allocated for the second touchdown on Ryugu, said Tomohiro Usui, a space scientist.
To obtain the second set of samples in July last year, Hayabusa2 dropped an impact element to explode beneath the asteroid’s surface, collecting material from the crafter so that it would not be affected by space radiation and other environmental factors.
Usui said the size differences suggest a different hardness of the bedrock on the asteroid. “One possibility is that the location of the second touchdown was a hard rock and larger particles broke and entered the compartment.”
JAXA continues the initial examination of asteroid samples before further studies next year. Scientists hope the evidence will provide information about the origins of the solar system and life on Earth. Following studies in Japan, some of the evidence will be shared with NASA and other international space agencies for further research.
Meanwhile, Hayabusa2 is on an 11-year expedition to another small, distant asteroid, 1998KY26, to try to study possible defenses against meteorites that could fly to Earth.
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