“We found the capsule! Along with the parachute! Wow!” Said the enthusiastic tweet, after the 40-centimeter-diameter object was located from a helicopter in the Woomera Desert Sunday morning (local time).
Samples from the surface
Space probe Hayabusa 2 (Peregrine Falcon 2) sent the capsule with the special cargo back on Saturday at 220,000 kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft, which is still continuing its mission, was launched in December 2014 to collect material 300 million kilometers away on Ryugu. It worked. These are samples from the surface and, for the first time, also from the subsurface of an asteroid.
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Ryugu is 900 meters in diameter and weighs about 450 million tons. Researchers hope to learn more about the origin of our solar system, about 4.6 billion years ago, through the analysis of the samples obtained.
Collected rock
These may contain organic matter, according to mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa. This could be “the source of life on earth.” It’s also possible that asteroids once brought water to our planet.
Detailed analyzes of the collected rock and dust will begin next June. Some of the samples will be made available by JAXA to NASA and to researchers in other countries in 2022. In 2010, an earlier model of the Hayabusa first brought soil samples from an asteroid to Earth.
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