Hayabusa2, which Japan left Earth in 2014 and reached its stable position above the asteroid Ryugu in June 2018, after traveling nearly 3.2 billion kilometers around the sun for more than three years, has collected some of the most primitive material ever studied.
Hayabusa2 The probe was tasked with collecting underground materials unaffected by cosmic rays or solar radiation and transporting them to Earth unharmed. Twice in 2019 and 2020 to the asteroid Ryugu Hayabusa2, which descended and collected underground samples for the first time from an asteroid, landed on Earth in late 2020.
The probe commissioned by the Japanese Space Research Agency (JAXA) to the history of the solar system It was expected to bring valuable examples of According to the analysis of samples taken from the probe, it has been studied so far in a laboratory on Earth. from the most primitive materials some appeared.
Ryugu could be one of Earth’s building blocks
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which reached the asteroid Ryugu in 2018, dropped a 5.4-gram drop from the asteroid. two small examples of regolith had received. These samples later landed on Earth in a parachute-equipped capsule in December 2020. The samples were distributed among scientific groups, including a team led by Tetsuya Yokoyama, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. According to the team’s new results, the component of the samples obtained so far is a cloud of gas that condenses to form the sun and planets. to the solar nebula revealed that it was the component with the most similarity. So the component found is 4.5 billion years ago It consists of the substances that make up the solar system.
Hisayoshi Yurimoto, a professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement. one of the building blocks of the world and because it’s so old of the materials that make up the planets stated to have occurred. The findings also support previous research stating that Ryugu was made from primitive materials. The exact age of Ryugu was unknown until now.
Ryugu may have formed 5 million years after the formation of the solar system
Research has shown that Ryugu has a temperature of between 27 and 47 degrees Celsius, and that approximately since the solar system began to form. to form after 5 million years indicates that it may have started. Stating that 900 meters in diameter Ryugu has a small size, researchers think that the asteroid may have broken off from a larger asteroid.
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Stating that no meteoritic or asteroid material examined on Earth so far has appeared in such a primitive and degraded form, the research team said that this is only the beginning of the examples brought by Hayabusa2, and that the next step will be to determine the abundance of various elements and their isotopes in the early solar system as planets form. explained.