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In the dusty desert town of Woomera in the southern Australian desert, scientists are getting ready. On December 6, 2020, after six years in space, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft will finally return to Earth.
It carries with it an incredibly rare, valuable and hard-earned cargo – at least 100 milligrams of material collected from the surface of Asteroid Ryugu. It will drop the capsule containing the sample on Earth, with the spacecraft itself continuing to visit other asteroid targets.
Hayabusa2’s return will mark a milestone in a remarkable feat of space science, a total journey of approximately 5.24 billion kilometers (nearly 3.3 billion miles). Asteroid Ryugu – formerly known as 1999 JU3 – is in an elliptical orbit that carries it just inside Earth’s orbital path around the Sun, and almost as far as Mars orbit.
Planning for Hayabusa2’s trip involved calculating where the asteroid would be in the future and plotting a path that would get the spacecraft where it needed to go, using Earth’s gravity for the acceleration spurts.
Then the spacecraft had to be able to hit the asteroid twice, collect material both times and bounce off the asteroid again, before returning to where Earth would be at the end of its return journey. .
The spacecraft is on that stretch now, and the capsule collection team has arrived in Australia. Repeats of capsule recovery and testing of the technology that will be used to track the incoming capsule are ongoing.
Preliminary team members who have already cleared their two-week COVID-19 quarantine arrived at the Woomera Royal Australian Air Force base last week and began preparations for landing and recovery.
This small cargo is a big problem. Only one other mission successfully returned an asteroid sample. JAXA’s original Hayabusa mission to the asteroid Itokawa returned a sample to Earth in 2010 – but the sampling device had failed and only a few micrograms of material were transported home.
One hundred milligrams is an absolute wealth of material in comparison, and scientists hope they can perform detailed tests. Because Ryugu is a primitive carbonaceous asteroid, it is believed to have preserved some of the solar system’s purest materials, relatively unchanged (except for a few irradiations) since its formation around 4.5 billion ago. years.
This small sample, scientists hope, will be able to provide insight into the beginnings of the solar system, as well as the formation and evolution of the rocky inner planets.
The capsule is expected to descend between 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. ACDT (Central Australian Daylight Time) on December 6, 2020, creating a brilliant fireball produced by heat from the atmospheric entry. A special heat shield will protect the capsule from temperatures of around 3000 degrees Celsius (5400 degrees Fahrenheit).
After deploying his parachute, it should land in an area of 100 square kilometers (40 square miles) in the Woomera Protected Area, sending a radio signal to the recovery team. Once the beacon lands, this signal will not be detectable from the ground stations, so a helicopter will fly over to follow the capsule.
Once located, the capsule will be transported by helicopter to a rapid research facility. There, all gases inside the container will be sampled, before the container is placed in a sealed transport box and airlifted to Japan. This is when the next step in the research process will truly begin, as scientists begin the painstaking work of studying and analyzing the rock.
While most countries around the world can’t watch Back to School live, JAXA has released viewing and photography tips for those who can and, for everyone, an AR app for iOS to follow the path of. the capsule. JAXA is also considering a livestream of the capsule exit and atmospheric entry.
During this time, the flight of Hayabusa2 will continue. Its next stop will be asteroid (98943) 2001 CC21 in July 2026, after which it will continue on asteroid 1998 KY26 for a meeting in July 2031.
This article was originally published by Science Alert. Read the original article here.
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