Japan's Hayabusa probe arrives at asteroid Ryugu

[Yazata]

And now they are saying that they have found the sample capsule after a helicopter search.

[Yazata]

JAXA photo from yesterday. Story is that they heard it on radio on its way down, but couldn't hear it on the ground. Despite that, they had a pretty precise idea where it came down and were able to spot its little parachute from the helicopter.

It's not the whole Hayabusa space vehicle which is still in space. It just shot by the Earth, released the sample capsule, and is now headed away again. The sample capsule is small, not much bigger than a plate.

They have gathered it up and transported it to the 'Quick Look Facility' in the Woomera Prohibited Area in South Australia (Australia's 'Area 51'). From there, the plan is to fly it to Japan in a JAXA plane. I don't expect that they will open it until they have it in sealed conditions to avoid contaminating the asteroid sample. One of the things that they want to learn is what kind of organic chemistry is happening out in space, so as to get a better idea what kind of life-precursors meteorites might have delivered to the early Earth.

Australians were joking yesterday, "Yeah, I found it! It's sitting in my garage. I had to clean it. It was full of dirt!"

[Image: 20201206_hayabusa2_capsule.jpg]

[C C]

World's first gas sample from deep space confirmed from Hayabusa-2 sample return container
https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-gas-...space.html

EXCERPT: . . . This has led to the conclusion that the gas in the sample container is derived from asteroid Ryugu. The grounds for making this decision are due to the following three points.

1) Gas analysis at the Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center and at the Woomera Local Headquarters in Australia gave the same result.

2) The sample container is sealed with an aluminum metal seal and the condition of the container is as designed, such that the inclusion of the Earth's atmosphere was kept well below the permissible level during the mission.

3) Since it was confirmed on the Sagamihara campus that gas of the same composition had been generated even after the removal of the container gas in Australia, it is considered that the collected gas must be due to the degassing from the sample.

This is the world's first sample return of a material in the gas state from deep space... (MORE - details)

[Yazata]

JAXA photos from Japan of two sample containers full of asteroid stuff from Ryugu. Detailed chemical analysis up next. It will be interesting to compare these Ryugu results with the analysis of the American Bennu sample which is currently on its way back.

Of particular interest is what looks like the body of a small asteroid crustacean in the photo on the right (marked by a question mark). Translating some of the Japanese-language commentary (thank you google translate) says that it appears to be foil. (And no MR, space aliens haven't been tossing away their candy wrappers.) What the Japanese think happened is that when their Hayabusa probe shot Ryugu to reveal what's under the surface, the 'bullet' exited through a foil membrane protecting the gun-barrel, which fragmented and sprayed out alongside the bullet. They think that their scoop recovered a piece of that foil membrane. (There are probably other pieces of the foil still on Ryugu to confound far future space explorers.)

(Conspiracy theorists know that they are just trying to hush up evidence of extraterrestrial life and that this little dead animal is probably now in the lab at Area 51.)

[Image: Ep-jA12VoAMOWs_?format=jpg&name=medium]