A patch of dust discovered by the Japanese spacecraft from an asteroid some 300 meters away revealed a surprising element: a drop of water.
This discovery provides new support for the theory that life on Earth may have originated from space.
The latest research results to be published from the analysis 5.4 grams of rock and dust collected by the Hayabusa-2 probe From the asteroid Ryugu.
“These water droplets have great significance,” scientist Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University told reporters before the study was published in Science on Friday.
Many researchers believe that water is transported [from outer space]but for the first time we have detected water on Ryugu, a near-Earth asteroid.
Launched in 2014 on its mission to Ryugu, Hayabusa-2 returned to Earth’s orbit two years ago to drop a capsule containing samples.
The precious payload has produced many insights, including organic matter which suggests that some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have formed in space.
The team’s latest discovery, Nakamura said, was a drop of liquid in Ryugu’s sample “which is carbonated water containing salt and organic matter.”
He said it supported the theory that asteroids like Ryugu, or its larger asteroids, could “deliver salt water and organic matter” in a collision with Earth.
“We found evidence that this could be directly related to, for example, the origin of the oceans or organic matter on Earth.”
Nakamura’s team of around 150 researchers, including 30 from the US, UK, France, Italy and China, analyzed Ryugu’s largest sample.
The samples are divided into several scientific groups to maximize the chances of new discoveries.
Kensei Kobayashi, an astrobiologist and professor emeritus at Yokohama National University, who was not part of the research team, praised the findings.
“The fact that water was detected in the sample itself is surprising,” he said, given its fragility and potential for destruction in space.
“This suggests that the asteroid contained water, in liquid form and not just ice, and possibly organic material that formed in that water.”
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