How Bits Of Asteroid Ryugu Were Shipped To NASA?

Space.com

NASA has received samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The samples were collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft.   Credit: NASA

Transcript

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

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