How Bits Of Asteroid Ryugu Were Shipped To NASA?

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NASA has received samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The samples were collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft.   Credit: NASA  How Were Bits Of Asteroid Ryugu Shipped To NASA?

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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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