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 Urashimataro

00:05rescued a small turtle from a group of mischievous children.

00:09A few days later, a giant turtle greeted Urashimataro

00:12and carried him beneath the sea to Ryugu Castle.

00:16There, Princess Otohime thanked Taro for rescuing the little turtle

00:20and rewarded him with a mysterious box of treasure.

00:23Today is really exciting.

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

00:34And this is an asteroid that was 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

00:56and then brought the samples back here to Earth December of 2020.

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

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

01:08It would be really terrible to bring something that far away from space

01:11and then have something go terribly wrong in shipping from Japan to the U.S.

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

01:19that everything that was shipped was there, and that nothing was leaking, and that was all fine.

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

01:27So 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 here 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,

01:49and now asteroids are just some of the many samples that we're bringing back

01:52to try and understand the solar system.

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