- Paul Rincon
- BBC Science Editor
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5 hours ago
Image Released, JAXA / EPA
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A member of the research team holds the container that houses samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu
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A research team has managed to find a space capsule carrying the first important samples from the rocks of an asteroid, which it believes may reveal important secrets about our solar system.
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The capsule contains materials from this near-ground body. It is a huge rock formation called “Ryugu”.
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The capsule had landed by parachute near the remote Woomera region in South Australia.
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These samples were collected by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2, which spent more than a year on a mission to examine this asteroid.
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The capsule containing the container containing these samples separated from Hayabusa-2 and entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The official Twitter page of the Hayabusa-2 mission indicated that the capsule and the parachute in which it landed on the ground were found at 19.47 GMT.
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“Hayabusa-2 has returned to Earth. We picked up a treasure. Everything was perfect,” the mission’s project manager, Yuichi Tsuda, told reporters on Sunday morning.
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He added that the container containing the samples was not damaged during the landing.
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Image Released, JAXA / EPA
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The capsule landed by parachute in a desert region of Australia
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Earlier Saturday, cameras captured the capsule as it landed in the form of a bright fireball rushing quickly over the Copperbed in Australia.
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It was rushing toward the ground at 11 kilometers per second when it launched slower parachutes, and then began sending radio signals that determine its location.
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The spacecraft landed in a wide field in the vast Woomera region, supervised by the Royal Australian Air Force.
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Image Released, Jaxa / EPA
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The capsule was placed in a container to be transported to a special facility for initial testing before being airlifted to Japan
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At approximately 18.07 GMT, the research team identified the landing site of the capsule, and a helicopter equipped with antennas to capture radio signals flew over the area to capture the container.
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The capsule was transported to a facility for rapid initial testing before being flown to Japan, where the scientists intend to examine and analyze a sample of the gases inside it.
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Image Released, EPA
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Cameras in Australia detected the capsule as it entered Earth’s atmosphere and looked like a speeding fireball
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The container, weighing 16 kg, will be transported to a special handling room of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Sagamihara for analysis of its contents.
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The spacecraft’s mission was designed to collect more than 100 mg of samples from the asteroid Ryugu.
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Professor Allan Fitzsimmons, from Queen’s University in Belfast, said: The sample “will reveal an enormous amount of information, not only about the history of the solar system, but also about those exceptional things (asteroids).”
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Asteroids are remnants of material formed during the formation of the solar system. It is composed of the same materials that went through the process of forming the Earth, but it is distinguished from it that it did not merge to form planets.
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“Having samples from an asteroid and Yugo would be a really exciting discovery in our scientific field. We believe that Ryugu is made of very old rocks that will give us an idea of how the solar system was formed,” said Professor Sarah Russell, responsible for the collection of planetary materials at the Natural History Museum in London. .
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Image Released, Jaxa
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The probe sent by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has sent images from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu
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Our study of samples collected in Ryugu may give us an idea of how water and other elements essential to life appeared on Earth at the beginning of its formation.
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Comets are believed to have carried a lot of the water on Earth in the early days of the solar system. Professor Fitzsimons says that the properties of the chemical composition of water in comets were sometimes different from the water in our oceans.
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However, the composition of water in some asteroids outside the solar system appears to be more closely matched with our water. It is possible that Ryugu originated in the frozen region before moving into its current orbit and close to Earth.
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Professor Fitzsimmons told the BBC: “We may have been looking at comets all the time to look at how water reached Earth in the early solar system, and of course we had to look a little closer to our planet; to those primitive asteroids, but rocky in their formation.”
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And indeed, this is something that we should carefully look at through those samples from Ryugu. ”
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The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, which passed near Earth and launched the capsule containing the samples, will send on a new mission as it travels to examine a much smaller asteroid up to 30 meters wide and reach it in 2031.
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