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#Returning asteroid sample can help crack secrets about how the solar system formed

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#Returning asteroid sample can help crack secrets about how the solar system formed

What is your idea of an asteroid? Many people think of them as potato-shaped, inert, and perhaps rather dull, pock-marked objects – far away in deep space. But over the last ten years, two Japanese space missions – Hayabusa and now Hayabusa 2 – have dispatched that view to the history books. Asteroids are interesting bodies that may be able to explain how life on Earth came about.

The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, has brought back samples to Earth from the 1km-wide asteroid Ryugu – touching down on December 6 in South Australia. The first Hayabusa craft returned samples from asteroid Itokawa in 2010, which like Ryugu orbit the Sun near Earth. I’m one of the scientists who analyzed the grains and am now looking forward to investigating Ryugu.

Observations by the Hayabusa 2 cameras have already revealed some intriguing features of asteroid Ryugu (which means “Dragon’s Palace.”) It seems that the asteroid formed as a spinning rubble pile of previous generations of different asteroids. Ryugu shows that asteroids have a rich and well-recorded history, being bombarded with meteorites and weather-beaten by the harsh solar wind and cosmic rays.

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Many “carbonaceous chondrite meteorites” like Ryugu are rich in water-bearing minerals such as clays – they may in fact have brought water to Earth. Intriguingly, observations of Ryugu suggests that it is not as water-rich as had been expected when it was selected as a target for this mission. It may be that the water in the asteroids it formed from boiled off as a result of internal heating by radioactive material. In contrast, Asteroid Bennu, which has been sampled by the NASA Osiris Rex mission and will bring back samples in 2023, does seem to be rich in hydrated minerals.

Image of Ryugu taken by Hayabusa 2.
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