Asteroid Ryugu Could Be One of Earth’s Building Blocks

The Hayabusa2 probe was tasked with collecting underground material unaffected by cosmic rays or solar radiation and transporting them to Earth unharmed. Hayabusa2 landed on Earth in late 2020, landing on the asteroid Ryugu twice in 2019 and 2020, and collecting underground samples from an asteroid for the first time.

Commissioned by the Japan Space Research Agency (JAXA), the probe was expected to bring in valuable examples of the Solar system’s past. Analysis of samples taken from the probe has revealed some of the most primitive materials ever studied in a laboratory on Earth.

Ryugu may be one of the building blocks of Earth

Reaching the asteroid Ryugu in 2018, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft received two small 5.4-gram samples of regolith from the asteroid. 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. The team’s new results reveal that the component of the samples obtained is the component most similar to the solar nebula ever found, the cloud of gas that condenses to form the sun and planets. In other words, the component found consists of the substances that formed the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

Hisayoshi Yurimoto, a professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement that Ryugu is one of the building blocks of the Earth and because it is very old, it consists of substances that form planets. 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 27 to 47 degrees Celsius and is about to form after the solar system began to form. It shows that it may have started to form 5 million years later. Stating that 900 meters in diameter Ryugu has a small size, researchers think that the asteroid may have broken off from a larger asteroid.

Stating that no meteoritic or asteroid material examined on Earth so far has appeared so primitive and degraded, the research team said that this is only the beginning of the examples brought by Hayabusa2, and that in the next step, various elements in the early solar system and their He announced that studies will be carried out to determine the abundance of isotopes.