Early in the morning on Dec. 6, 2020, JAXA’s Hayabusa2’s sample-return capsule streaked through the sky over Woomera, Australia. The heat-shielded capsule, packed with material blasted from the surface of asteroid Ryugu in 2018, descended toward the desert sand. After tracking the precious cargo to its landing site, scientists successfully recovered the most pristine samples ever obtained of a carbon-rich asteroid.
Scientists have begun analyzing the samples. In one recent study published Aug. 15 in Nature Astronomy, researchers discovered the first evidence that Ryugu formed from material that originated in the outer solar system. The results also support the idea that the asteroid belt (located between Mars and Jupiter) may have been populated by planetesimals from two distinct sources when the solar system was still in its infancy.
“When I obtained the initial results from my instruments, I could not believe it,” Motoo Ito, a cosmochemist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and lead author of the latter study, tells Astronomy.
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