The capsule containing a good portion/quantity of rock from the asteroid is in a “good” condition, according to scientists.
A container containing material from a rock called Ryugu was smashed to the ground near Woomera in South Australia on Saturday evening (GMT).
How Was It Found?
An Australian recovery team found a spacecraft lying on sandy ground, with its parachute wrapped around a tree.
Samples were originally collected by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2.
The spacecraft spent more than a year investigating Ryugu before returning to Earth. As it approached our planet, Hayabusa-2 pulled out a sample capsule and fired its engines to the other side.
The capsule, in turn, has entered Earth’s atmosphere.
The official Hayabusa-2 account on Twitter reported that the pill and its parachute were available at 19:47 GMT.
“Hayabusa-2 is at home,” said Dr Yuichi Tsuda, project manager for the missions, at a press conference on Sunday morning (GMT) in Sagamihara, Japan.
“We’ve collected the treasure chest,” he said, adding: “The capsule collection is perfectly made.”
He noted in the record that no damage was found to the container.
The Hayabusa-2 Space Shuttle
Dr Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of Japan’s Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), said: “We started developing Hayabusa-2 in 2011. I think this dream has come true.”
Speaking to reporters, he acknowledged a previous mission that addressed technical issues, but said: “With regard to Hayabusa-2, we have done everything systematically – 100%. And we have succeeded in sample retrieval as planned.
The next phase includes machines called MMX, which will aim to retrieve samples from Mars’ largest moon Phobos.
Earlier on Saturday, the capsule was captured by cameras as a flaming ball flowing into Australia’s Coober Pedy region.
Shouting at Earth at a distance of 11km / s, it sent parachutes to slow down. The capsule then began to transmit a lamp that had information about its location.
The spacecraft touched on a large Woomera range, operated by the Royal Australian Air Force.
At 18:07 GMT (04:37 local time), the recovery team identified the location of the capsule on the ground. The helicopter, fitted with a torch retrieval antenna, flew into the air shortly thereafter.
Satoru Nakazawa, from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), who was part of the Woomera campaign, described the search: “We went there with a helicopter and it was flashing a flashlight. But at the time, it was dark, so it was unclear.
“I flew over the area [where it landed] many times and I thought that was probably where it was. After that the Sun rose and we were able to see with our own eyes that this capsule was there. We thought: ‘Wow, we got it!”
“But we had a wonderful, stressful time until sunrise.”
What Next?
The capsule is then taken to a “quick-sight center” for testing. There, scientists plan to collect gases inside the container for analysis.
After that, the 16kg capsule will be transported to Japan, where it will be transported to a room in Jaxa in Sagamihara for analysis and storage.
The machines plan to collect more than 100mg sample from the Ryugu asteroid.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, of Queen’s University Belfast, said the sample “would reveal a tremendous amount, not only of the history of the Solar System, but also of these things”.
Asteroids are actually the building materials left over from the construction of the Solar System. They are made of the same materials that started to build the Earth, but they avoid being placed on planets.
“Having asteroid samples like Ryugu will greatly enrich our field. We think Ryugu is made of very old stones that will tell us how the Solar System was built,” Professor Sara Russell, leader of the London Planetary Natural History Museum, told BBC News.
Reading the Ryugu samples can tell us how water and life ingredients were transported in the First World. ‘
It was long thought that comets brought a lot of Earth’s water in the early days of the Solar System. Alan Fitzsimmons said the chemical composition of tail water is sometimes very different from our ocean water profile.
The water composition of certain asteroids in the Solar System, however, is very similar. Ryugu probably came out of this cold place, before moving inside his current orbit, near Earth.
“We may have been looking at the comets all this time to bring water to Earth from the first Solar System. Maybe we should have looked closer to home, to these old but rocky asteroids,” said Prof Fitzsimmons BBC News.
“Of course that’s something to look at in these Ryugu samples.”
The space shuttle Hayabusa-2, which passed through Earth after releasing its capsule, is being sent to another mission. It will now travel to a much smaller area, 30m wide, by 2031.
