spacecraft. The craft launched in 2014, arrived at the space rock in 2018 and in December 2020 dropped off a capsule carrying 0.2 ounces of asteroid material to Earth. This has given scientists the ability to study the asteroid up close here on our home planet with a full range of technologies. and what its surface and subsurface material is really like. And, as it turns out, Ryugu is covered in"flat and elongated" pieces.
"The returned samples well represent Ryugu surface particles from a morphological point of view," Tachibana said, adding that the pieces they studied were flat and elongated. "This morphology, probably broken pieces of larger boulders, seems characteristic of Ryugu surface pebbles, and we have them in hand now," Tachibana said.
The black containers in the image harbor precious pieces of near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, which arrived at Earth with the Hayabusa2 mission in December 2020.The process of getting pieces from an asteroid from outer space to Earth and safely into the hands of scientists is tricky, to put it lightly. Tachibana, who worked with the sample collection and capsule recovery teams on the Hayabusa2 mission, said that, unsurprisingly,"there have been many nerve-wracking things ...the safety recovery of the capsule and the rapid and safe preparation for the container opening in the curation chamber were actually most nerve-wracking for me. We had to open the container and take out particles as soon as possible.
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