You Too Can Explore A Real Asteroid!

So here is the database for the curation of the pebbles/grains/dust that Japan's Hayabusa2 space craft BROUGHT BACK under hermetically sealed conditions from asteroid Ryugu last year.

https://darts.isas.jaxa.jp/curation/hayabusa2/

 

 

you can download a pic of each under magnification.  also it seems you can borrow them?  god knows what kind of qualifications you need for that, but researchers obviously borrow them to study, maybe make microslices and analyse them.

it begins.  they look like some kind of slaggy crumbly dusty coal.  they may be of similar structure, though not from biology but from interstellar processes and early solar system processes.  they also look like they WOULD NOT survive entry into our atmosphere as meteorites (even if they were larger peices)  my gut tells me we don't have meteorties like these.  But I need to look up what we've learned about them so far.

Basically this is stuff left over trom the origins of the solar system.  These things formed maybe near the asteroid belt.  Closer in... pebbles formed with more rock and iron (like earth).  Further out things formed with more ices (water, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia...)  But there was much mixing and then more mixing and processing quickly after formation.  Japan and I think NASA has previously only brought back a tiny bit of DUST particles from an asteroid or comet.

Of course we have brought back many pounds of moon rock, but they are rock and geologicaly processed, not from the beginings of the solar system.  We also have tons of meteorites of many types of origins, but the delicate ones like Ryugu stuff, is very altered by its passage through our atmosphere.  We also have a couple dozen chunks of rock that got splashed off of mars by big meteorites hitting mars, and landed here as meteorites.  except for one, they are all young and heavily processed by mars geology.  We also have

i remember when hayabusa2 sent bouncing robots to explore the asteroid's surface they decided that the rocks they were bouncing on were NOT very strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/162173_Ryugu

 In a few years,  NASA's Osiris Rex will return more samples (perhaps more and larger than these) from a similar asteroid it also visited, called Bennu. I don't know why O-Rex is taking longer!

If I had the presence these days... I'd write REAMS about this stuff.  Actually... I'd learn more too.