Hayabusa2 mission will lay first samples of underground asteroids on Earth

Hayabusa2 was launched on December 3, 2014 and arrived on the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in June 2018. The spacecraft collected a sample of the asteroid’s surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a “bullet” copper into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019.

Then, Hayabusa2 left the asteroid in November 2019 and returned to Earth.

All in all, the mission’s science team believe that a gram of material has been collected, but they can’t be sure until they open it.

“A gram may seem small, but for us a gram is huge,” Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director general of JAXA’s Department of Solar System Sciences, said in an online briefing hosted by the Australian Science Media Center. “Just answer our scientific questions.”

The agency’s first Hayabusa mission returned samples from the asteroid Itokawa to Earth in June 2010, but scientists said that due to the failure of the spacecraft’s sampling device, they did not were able to recover only micrograms of dust from the asteroid.

“Ryugu is linked to the process that made our planet habitable,” Fujimoto said. “The Earth was born dry; it did not start with water. We believe that distant bodies like Ryugu came inside the solar system, struck the Earth, provided water and ‘have made habitable. This is the fundamental question that we are looking for and we need. samples to solve this. “

A fiery return

Since Hayabusa2 is not returning to Earth, it ejects the 35-pound sample return capsule as it passes near our planet this weekend at a distance of 136,701 miles. Then, the spacecraft will change course to travel beyond Earth and accompany its extended mission.

The Australian government has authorized JAXA to disembark its capsule in the Woomera Prohibited Zone in South Australia. This remote area is used by the Australian Department of Defense for testing.

The Japanese space agency previously used this site for the Hayabusa landing in 2010. Its partnership with Australia, the vast, flat and open nature of the terrain, and the fact that the team could quickly move the sample of Australia in Japan turned to JAXA.

Around 4 a.m. Australian time, the team will search for a fireball to cross the Australian sky.

“For non-team members the fireball seems like the grand finale. But for us it’s the bell ringing and telling us, ‘This is not an exercise,’” said Fujimoto. .

The large landing zone stretches 124 miles from north to south and 62 miles from east to west. The agency designated this large area to compensate for any uncertainty created by the local wind speed when the capsule deploys its parachute.

Then the team will try to locate the landing point of the capsule as quickly as possible.

Once the capsule is located, a helicopter will take scientists from the sampling team to the landing site so they can retrieve it. The capsule will be placed in a protective box and they will bring it back to headquarters, a temporary facility they have built.

This clean room will allow the team to check the capsule and allow degassing. It is possible that the capsule collected gases from the asteroid – which are likely emitted by the sample the spacecraft collected. Any detection of gas in the gas sample container is a good sign that they have successfully collected a material sample from the asteroid.

An official announcement on the amount of material collected from the asteroid will be made once the samples are returned to Japan and opened, Fujimoto said.

Hayabusa2 will fly through three asteroids between 2026 and 2031, eventually reaching the fast-spinning micro-asteroid 1998 KY26 in July 2031 millions of miles from Earth. This will be the first flight over this type of asteroid.

What’s in an asteroid sample?

Asteroids are like the remnants of our solar system’s formation, preserving information about the origins of the planets as well as the vital elements that allow life to exist on Earth.

Ryugu is shaped like a diamond and is just over half a mile in diameter.

“I predict that the Hayabusa2 samples from the asteroid Ryugu will be very similar to the meteorite that fell in Australia near Murchison, Victoria, over 50 years ago,” said Trevor Ireland, professor at the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences and a member of the Hayabusa2 science team in Woomera, in a statement.

“The Murchison meteorite opened a window into the origin of organic matter on Earth, as these rocks contained simple amino acids as well as abundant water. We will examine whether Ryugu is a potential source of organic matter and water on Earth. when the solar system was forming and if these still remain intact on the asteroid. “

Ryugu is also a near-Earth asteroid that has an orbit that takes it between Earth and Mars. It will make a close approach to Earth in December 2076. Understanding these potentially dangerous asteroids could allow space agencies to plan how to deflect them.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission recently collected a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, Bennu, similar in composition to Ryugu. In fact, based on early data from both missions, scientists working on both missions believe that it is possible that these two asteroids once belonged to the same larger parent body before it was shattered by an impact.

Bennu’s sample will be returned to Earth by 2023.

Patrick Michel, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, is a researcher for both missions.

“It’s really important to realize that no two asteroids are the same,” Michel told CNN in October. “Even though Bennu and Ryugu share some intriguing similarities and fall into the same (primitive) category, they also have some very interesting differences. And these samples will occupy generations of researchers because a large quantity will be kept for future generations who will benefit from them. increasing the technology and precision of the instruments used to analyze them. “