How Were Bits Of Asteroid Ryugu 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

00:00 Long ago, a fisherman named Urashima Taro rescued a small turtle from a group of mischievous

00:08 children.

00:09 A few days later, a giant turtle greeted Urashima Taro and carried him beneath the sea to Ryugu

00:15 Castle.

00:16 There, Princess Otohime thanked Taro for rescuing the little turtle and rewarded him with a

00:21 mysterious box of treasure.

00:24 Today is really exciting.

00:31 We're picking up a bunch of samples from the asteroid Ryugu.

00:34 This is an asteroid that was visited by a spacecraft from Japan.

00:38 This was the Hayabusa 2 mission.

00:40 This is the second mission of its kind that they've sent out to asteroids.

00:44 It's very similar to the OSIRIS-REx mission that NASA has to the asteroid Bennu.

00:49 They went and visited this asteroid and they landed actually two rovers on the surface

00:53 to help them figure out where they wanted to sample and then brought the samples back

00:57 here to Earth December of 2020.

01:00 Our partners at the Japanese Space Agency sent us a box full of samples from Ryugu.

01:05 So the first thing we have to do is make sure that everything is okay.

01:07 It'd be really terrible to bring something that far away from space and then have something

01:12 go terribly wrong in shipping from Japan to the U.S.

01:15 So we just wanted to check everything out, make sure that the packaging was intact, that

01:19 everything that was shipped was there and that nothing was leaking and that it was all

01:23 fine.

01:24 And then we put it in the freezer for safekeeping.

01:27 So sample return mission is a really important scientific activity.

01:31 Often when we think about space exploration, we're thinking about rovers and flyby missions

01:36 and we forget the true value of just bringing things back into our analytical facilities

01:40 here on Earth.

01:41 And that's something the scientific community has been doing really well for a long time.

01:46 If you think about the moon samples and solar particles and now asteroids are just some

01:50 of the many samples that we're bringing back to try and understand the solar system.

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