A member of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency retrieves a capsule dropped by capsule Hayabusa2 in Woomera, southern Australia, in 2020. The capsule brought back pieces of asteroid Ryugu.
Jaxa
Two Swiss research projects are receiving tiny grains from the asteroid Ryugu for study purposes. They want to use them to find out where the water on our planet comes from, according to a statement from the University of Lausanne.
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“Ryugu is around 4.6 billion years old,” Nicolas Greber, researcher at the Natural History Museum of Geneva (NHMG), told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA on Tuesday. Greber is co-initiator of one of the two Swiss research projects selected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
In addition to the joint project of the NHMG and the University of Lausanne, researchers from the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich are also receiving asteroid dust.
Ryugu originates from the time when the Earth’s solar system and the planets were formed, Greber said. “The special thing about the samples from Ryugu, however, is that they were obtained directly from the asteroid.”
Unlike meteorites from which similarly old rock samples were already available, the rock particles from Ryugu did not fly through the Earth’s atmosphere without protection and also did not mix with any elements on Earth. The researchers can therefore examine the samples as they were found on the asteroid.
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Japanese astronauts brought just 5.4 grams of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in 2020. The Swiss scientists are studying grains from the asteroid, which, with a size of 50 to 100 micrometres, are about as thick as a hair.
The ETH Zurich project is investigating the noble gases trapped in the samples. The research project at the NHMG and the University of Lausanne is concentrating its analysis on two minerals: sulphides and apatites.
“We will try to reconstruct the composition of the oldest water in Ryugu and find out whether its chemical signature is comparable to the water on our planet,” Greber explained.
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