A space capsule containing the first significant quantities of rock from an asteroid (Ryugu) has arrived safely on Earth.
Sreedhu S S
credits: BBC
A space capsule containing the first significant quantities of rock from an asteroid (Ryugu) has arrived safely on Earth after being launched from Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2.
In 2014, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a spacecraft to asteroid Ryugu: a primitive, half-mile-wide rock that zips through our solar system up to 131 million miles (211 million kilometres) from the sun. The spacecraft first landed on Ryugu in February to collect shallow samples from the surface. But scientists knew that probing deeper could reveal more pure rock from the beginnings of our solar system, since that material hasn't been exposed to harsh radiation from the sun. So in April 2019, Hayabusa 2 blasted a 33-foot crater into the asteroid using a copper plate and a box of explosives.
The re-entry capsule, carrying samples from the asteroid Ryugu, was dropped off by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 and retrieved from Woomera restricted area, about 460km north of Adelaide.
Ryugu is a C-type asteroid, which means it's rich with organic carbon molecules, water, and possibly amino acids - the building blocks for proteins that were essential to the evolution of life on Earth. Some theories posit that an asteroid first delivered amino acids to our planet.
"Organic materials are the origins of life on Earth, but we still don't know where they came from," Makoto Yoshikawa, a Hayabusa-2 project mission manager, said in a briefing on Friday, according to The Guardian "We are hoping to find clues to the origin of life on Earth by analysing details of the organic materials brought back by Hayabusa-2. Scientists believe this subsurface material could be as old as our solar system, since it's been shielded from the sun's radiation and hasn't undergone the heating and cooling processes that altered rock inside the planets.
As such, the Hayabusa-2 samples could reveal new details about the beginnings of our solar system and the origins of life on Earth. The capsule may also contain some gas, which will be extracted in Australia, astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Gases trapped in the rock samples could reveal more about conditions prevailing about 4.6 billion years ago.
Some of the Ryugu material will then make its way to labs around the world, where scientists will study it for clues about the solar system’s early days and the rise of life on Earth.