NASA has received samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The samples were collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft.
Credit: NASA
Credit: NASA
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TechTranscript
00:00Long ago, a fisherman named Urashima Taro rescued a small turtle from a group of mischievous
00:08children.
00:09A few days later, a giant turtle greeted Urashima Taro and carried him beneath the sea to Ryugu
00:15Castle.
00:16There, Princess Otohime thanked Taro for rescuing the little turtle and rewarded him with a
00:21mysterious box of treasure.
00:29Today is really exciting.
00:31We're picking up a bunch of samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and this is an asteroid that
00:35was visited by a spacecraft from Japan.
00:38This was the Hayabusa 2 mission.
00:40This is the second mission of its kind that they've sent out to asteroids.
00:44It's very similar to the OSIRIS-REx mission that NASA has to the asteroid Bennu.
00:49They went and visited this asteroid, and they landed actually two rovers on the surface
00:53to help them figure out where they wanted to sample, and then brought the samples back
00:58here to Earth in December of 2020.
01:01Our partners at the Japanese Space Agency sent us a box full of samples from Ryugu.
01:05So the first thing we have to do is make sure that everything is okay.
01:08It'd be really terrible to bring something that far away from space and then have something
01:12go terribly wrong in shipping from Japan to the U.S., so we just wanted to check everything
01:16out, make sure that the packaging was intact, that everything that was shipped was there,
01:21and that nothing was leaking, and that it was all fine.
01:24And then we put it in the freezer for safekeeping.
01:27The Sample Return mission is a really important scientific activity.
01:31Often when we think about space exploration, we're thinking about rovers and flyby missions,
01:36and we forget the true value of just bringing things back into our analytical facilities
01:40here on Earth.
01:41And that's something the scientific community has been doing really well for a long time.
01:46If you think about the moon samples and solar particles, and now asteroids are just some
01:50of the many samples that we're bringing back to try and understand the solar system.
01:57NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology