More than we were expecting from Hayabusa2

I tried to find a thread about the Hayabusa2 mission to retrieve material from the asteroid Ryugu, but I couldn't find one, either from the launch in 2014 or the successful material capture last year. But what came back is extremely interesting.

First look at Japanese Hayabusa2 asteroid sample indicates Ryugu is similar to Earth's rarest meteorites

Quote:

Just over a year ago, a space capsule carrying a very special cargo streaked across the sky and touched down in the South Australian outback. Sealed in a canister were samples of dust and pebbles blasted off Ryugu, a lumpy asteroid, by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission. When the team from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) first opened the canister they were excited to find they'd snapped up a good sample. And when they got the canister back to their lab in Japan they were even more surprised... The first analysis of the physical properties and the composition of the material retrieved from the asteroid is revealed today in two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy. It turns out Ryugu is a very rare type of asteroid with a mix of elements seen in less than a handful of meteorites that have been found on Earth. "It's not just rare, it's a very precious sample," Professor Fujimoto said. "It will tell us about the very early history of the Solar System, and the process that made Earth habitable."

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3sk7L8Q