(Newser)
– They look like small fragments of charcoal, but soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing. The samples that Japanese space officials described Thursday are 0.4 inches long and are very hard, they don’t break when picked up or dumped in another container, the AP reports. Smaller black and sandy granules were described last week that the probe collected and returned separately. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft obtained the two sets of samples last year from two sites on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 190 million kilometers from Earth. He dropped them from space into an Australian Outback target and the samples were taken to Japan in early December.
The sandy granules that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency described last week came from the spacecraft’s first touchdown in April 2019. The larger fragments came from the compartment assigned for the second touchdown to Ryugu, Tomohiro said. Usui, space materials scientist. To obtain the second set of samples, Hayabusa2 dropped an impactor to explode below the asteroid’s surface, collecting material that would not be affected by space radiation and other environmental factors. Usui said the differences in size suggest a different hardness from the asteroid’s parent rock. JAXA continues the initial examination of asteroid samples before more complete studies next year, after which some of the samples will be shared with NASA and other international space agencies for further research.
(Read more asteroid stories.)