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Hayabusa2 brings back asteroid dust
December 21, 2020CNRS
On the night of 5-6 December, a very special package landed in the South Australian desert region of Woomera. It contained samples of dust brought back from asteroid Ryugu, after a long journey by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. These tiny grains of material should speak volumes about the earliest moments of the Solar System.
“Returning these samples was the mission’s main goal,” explains Patrick Michel, senior researcher at the Joseph-Louis Lagrange Laboratory1 and a member of the Hayabusa22 scientific team, as well as of the Hera,3 MMX4 and OSIRIS-REx5 missions. “Ryugu is a carbonaceous asteroid, a category so primitive that its composition isn’t thought to have changed since the formation of the Solar System. It should therefore contain all the ingredients needed to make planets. We also hope to discover the role of asteroids in the emergence of life on Earth and find out whether the organic matter present on their s