Japanese space agency officials said Tuesday they discovered a "large number" of pitch-black rock and dust particles after opening the capsule returned to Earth earlier this month by the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, giving hopeful scientists their first important specimens ever to be returned from the asteroid.
Scientists working in a laboratory in Sagamihara, Japan, opened the first of three sample collection chambers inside Hayabusa 2's return capsule, initiating the process of studying the material in search of fresh insights into the past of the solar system.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which oversees the Hayabusa 2 mission, released a photo on Tuesday inside a roughly two-inch (48-millimeter) container known as chamber A. The photo shows a small pile of black Ryugu pebbles, a half-mile-wide carbon-rich asteroid, a critical building block for life.
Mission planners engineered Hayabusa 2 to obtain at least 100 milligrams of Ryugu asteroid dust. Engineers had no means to quantify the contents of the sample canister until it returned to Earth, but they were assured that the spacecraft would obtain the necessary material.
It appears that trust was well-founded. The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft released its sample return capsule for a super-hot re-entry into Earth's atmosphere on Dec. 5. Almost 16-inch (40-centimeter) sample carrier landed via parachute in Woomera, Australia, where Japanese teams were in a position to retrieve the capsule.
After transporting the sample carrier to the "quick-look" inspection facility in Australia, the capsule was flown back to Japan on Dec. 7. Scientists moved the return capsule to the receiving lab at the JAXA facility in Sagamihara, where chamber A was opened on Monday (U.S. time).
"When we actually opened it, I was speechless. It was more than we expected, and there was so much that I was truly impressed," said the JAXA scientist Hirotaka Sawada. "It wasn't fine particles like powder, but there were plenty of samples that measured several millimeters across."
Hayabusa 2 used chamber A to gather specimens obtained during the first touch-and-go mission landing on asteroid Ryugu on Feb. 21, 2019. Scientists will next open chambers B and C, and the sample curation group will extract the asteroid material for study, JAXA said.
JAXA reported that the Hayabusa 2 team also examined the gas sealed inside the return capsule. Scientists assume that gas molecules, which varied from the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, were formed by the outgassing of asteroid specimens.
Returning to Earth earlier this month, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft ended a six-year round trip to the Ryugu asteroid. The vessel was launched aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket in December 2014 and arrived near Ryugu in 2018 to begin several months of surveys before the first landing was attempted.
