Australian desert home to Japan’s asteroid sample return mission

After spending six years in space, a Japanese spacecraft just landed in the desert of southern Australia, bringing along parts of asteroid rocks back to Earth. The vehicle spent a year and a half touring around the asteroid, mapping the rock’s surface and collecting samples of material before departing back to Earth. The scientific community will study the rock samples that Hayabusa2 has returned, as they could tell us more about what our Solar System was like when the planets first started forming.

Source: Flickr/DLR German Aerospace Center CC BY 2.0

Key Points

• The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency hoped to bring back 100 milligrams of material
• Hayabusa2 is Japan's second mission to retrieve samples of an asteroid

These rocks have been around since the beginning of the Solar System, and it is believed that asteroids haven't really changed much over the last 4.6 billion years. These objects contain many of the same materials that were present at the Solar System's birth, so studying these rocks in labs here on Earth could provide key context about the early days of the planets. The capsule will be  later transported to Japan, where we'll learn how much asteroid material the mission gathered and how it will be studied.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency hoped to bring back 100 milligrams of material from  the asteroid codenamed “Ryugu”, but scientists didn't have a way to measure how much sample Hayabusa2 had collected while in space. When the arm installed into the vehicle made contact, it shot out a bullet-like projectile that punctured the asteroid, releasing a whole mess of dust and pebbles that were collected into the horn.

The capsule after completing its mission set course for Earth, breaking through through our planet's atmosphere this morning. It then deployed a parachute, slowing the vehicle from about 12 kilometers per second, or nearly 27,000 miles per hour, so that it could land gently in the Woomera Prohibited Area in southern Australia.

Hayabusa2 will hopefully have collected even more than the original Hayabusa's offerings. In 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is expected to return the largest sample of material from an asteroid ever collected. The main spacecraft of Hayabusa2 is still in space and just set out on a quest to visit another asteroid called 1998 KY26.