Down to Earth
Under the hot sunshine of the South Australian outback, a team of scientists could barely contain their excitement as they collected alien rock samples that could help unlock some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. This was the culmination of a six-year mission that saw a Japanese space probe travel billions of miles through space to harvest the first-ever subsurface samples from an asteroid and parachute them back to Earth.
Protected by special heat shields, the capsule containing the samples was dropped back to Earth and looked just like a shooting star as it burned through the atmosphere. Then at about six miles above ground, a parachute opened to slow its fall. It landed safely in the Woomera Prohibited Area of South Australia.
Hayabusa2 was launched back in 2014, and has since travelled 3.2 billion miles on a round trip to visit the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft arrived in 2018 and touched down twice, where it deployed two rovers and a small lander onto the surface. It also fired a device into the asteroid in February 2019 to create an artificial crater – the first time this has ever been done – allowing the probe to collect an untouched sample from beneath the surface to deliver back to Earth.
Scientists are excited because the asteroid is thought to be the type that carbonaceous meteorites come from, which could contain amino acids – the building blocks of life. And because some of the samples are from beneath the surface, they will have been untainted by cosmic radiation and other environmental factors.
A camera image of the spinning, diamondshaped asteroid Ryugu
© JAXA, Chiba Institute of Technology & collaborators