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– They look like small pieces of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing. The samples Japanese space officials described Thursday are as big as 0.4 inches and rock hard, they don’t break when picked up or poured into another container, the AP reports. Smaller black, sandy grains that the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft received two sets of samples last year from two locations on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 300 million miles from Earth. He dropped them from space on a target in the Australian outback and the samples were brought to Japan in early December.
The grains of sand described by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency last week came from the spacecraft’s first landing in April 2019. The larger fragments came from the compartment assigned for the second landing on Ryugu, said Tomohiro Usui, space materials scientist. . To get the second set of monsters, Hayabusa2 dropped an impactor to shoot beneath the asteroid’s surface and collect material that wouldn’t be affected by space radiation and other environmental factors. Usui said the differences in size indicate different hardness of the rock on the asteroid. JAXA is continuing the initial survey of the asteroid samples pending more complete studies next year, after which some samples will be shared with NASA and other international space agencies for additional research.
(Read more stories about asteroids.)