The grains of material collected in 2019 and reported on Earth by the Japanese Hayabusa-2 probe are being analyzed, to understand the formation of this witness of the first ages of the solar system.
On December 6, 2020, in the morning, in a desert area of southern Australia, a precious acknowledgment of the sky was recovered. After more than one year of travel and millions of kilometers traveled, the Hayabusa-2 probe, of the Japanese space agency, dropped on earth a cargo of 5.4 grams taken from the Ryugu asteroid at two moments, the February 22 and July 11, 2019.
This heavenly 1 kilometer splash-shaped body, swollen from an equatorial and creeped bead of thousands of rocks several meters in diameter, turns at a distance between 140 and 210 million kilometers from the sun, on A orbit pretty close to that of the earth. It could be one of the first-aged peak fossils of solar system formation. When the gases and dusts of the disc around the sun started abedee in a bigger body, before shatting between them, to give smaller bodies, like the asteroids, and the bricks that will make the planets.
“If we want to find the recipe for the training of planets, the asteroids are the best tracer, because they have remained small, they have little heated and kept the memory of the initial composition of the solar system,” reminded Patrick Michel, Member of the Hayabusa-2 mission at the Observatory of the Côte d’Azur, in [Nute], on November 16, 2019. Hence the importance of Ryugu, the fourth object to give his body to science after The moon, the comet 81p / Wild-2 and the Asteroid Itokawa.
One year after this sample feedback, two articles of astronomy nature published on December 20 deliver the results of the first analyzes. “It’s more than ÉMOUVENT to observe a material of 4.5 billion years goes back to the beginning of the formation of the solar system. And for the first time, our tools allow us to observe the collection In its entirety, “appreciates Jean-Pierre Bibring, an astrophysics professor in Paris-Saclay and responsible for one of the instruments, Micromega, which equipped the robot Mascot, dropped on the asteroid. “This is a unique opportunity to observe this primitive material. We are very pleased to have been invited to participate in these preliminary analyzes by the Japanese”, also considers his colleague Cédric Pilorget, at the Institute of Space Astrophysics ( IAS).
One of the darkest bodies of the solar system
In late December 2020, a few days after recovery, the analyzes started in a special Japanese laboratory, ensuring the protection of the Ryugu component material in vacuum or nitrogen speakers to avoid contamination and degradation. The first article described weighings and microscopic measurements of the grains of different sizes. The second , illuminated By the observations of the IAS instrument, Micromega, delivers the first information on the composition of these grains.
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