’Roid reward
There’s nothing quite as pleasurable as exceeding expectations.
Japanese scientists have peeked inside the sample capsule from Japan’s Hayabusa2 sample-return mission and found it to contain 5.4 grams of material from asteroid 162173 Ryugu.
“[That’s] far above the target of one-tenth of a gram,” said Hitoshi Kuninaka, vice-president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), last weekend at a virtual meeting of the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).
The sample looks like coarse black sand, he added. “The largest grain is 1 centimetre.”
The material was collected in 2019 and arrived on Earth on 6 December 2020, when the spacecraft flew by and ejected its sample container to a landing site at the Woomera Test Range, in South Australia.