Almost 8 years ago, on December 2, 2014, when the Hayabusa 2 space probe took off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agencywhose objective was to travel to the asteroid Ryugu in order to examine it and obtain samples of it.
It was in December 2020, after being in space for around 6 years, the Japanese spacecraft returned to Earth bringing with it the Ryugu samples, which it took both from the surface and from a drilling made by it.
In this sense, Hayabusa managed get 2 groups of samples: A and C. The first of these come from the surface of the asteroid, which were obtained during the initial approach of the probe with Ryugu.
For its part, the samples of the group come from the interior of Ryugu. In order to get them, he had to shoot to make a hole. Also, it was detailed that the regolith particles are greater than 1 millimeter and those of group A are, in general, larger than those of group C.
The samples were subjected to laboratory tests on 17 individual grains of regolith, which is the unconsolidated rock material obtained from the ground. Among the samples, crystals of an iron and nickel sulfide were found, within which there was water carrying carbon dioxide (CO2), according to the results published in the article “Formation and evolution of the carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu: direct evidence from returned samples”, published in the journal Science.
This means that the asteroid from which the Japanese spacecraft obtained a sample derives from a body larger than this that was formed in the outer solar system.
“Studying the Ryugu samples in the lab provides a fantastic complement to other meteorite studies, because it allows us to learn about this specific known asteroidal object. For most meteorites, the precise body of origin is unknown,” said Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who was involved in studying the samples.
For the analysis, we used the mineralogy and petrology. Ryugu comes from the solar system where CO2 and water exist in solid form. According to the results of the samples, its origin is from a region located between 3 and 4 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, possibly beyond Jupiter. It is believed to derive from the Polana and Eulalia families of asteroids.
“The mineralogy of the Ryugu samples is shown in this paper to be highly similar to CI chondrites, a carbon-rich meteorite collected here on Earth. Understanding Ryugu’s formation history has real implications for understanding the origin of these meteorites and where their parent bodies formed in our Solar System,” said Deborah Domingue of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson.
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It should be noted that the studies on the samples of the asteroid Ryugu taken by Hayabusa are just beginning, so there is still much to discover about said body.
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