This canister come from the Nipponese spacecraft Habayusa , the first rocket to move around to an asteroid and back . It might look empty , but inside are dust molecule that come from the asteroid . . . hopefully .
Although Habayusa didsucceed in bringing back effigy and informationfrom the good - Earth asteroid Itokawa , it ’s still unclear whether it managed to bring back any material from the careen . Jaxa , the Japanese space agency , had bankrolled the 200 million dollar undertaking , and they enjoyed pretty much nothing but trouble for their attempt .
https://gizmodo.com/japanese-probe-hayabusa-returns-from-space-with-a-fistf-5562434
As we explained last year , the investigation hardly made it back to Earth at all , experiencing multiple railway locomotive nonstarter , losing contact with Mission Control , and even getting hit with a solar flare . in the end , it crashed down two years lately , and now a big part of the success of the undertaking hinges on whether those tiny junk particles actually came from Itokawa .
https://gizmodo.com/will-hayabusa-make-it-back-to-earth-5409641
The picture that Jaxa has resign do n’t incisively inspire confidence that this is a major find , but scientist both in charge of and respect the undertaking rest affirmative . Professor Trevor Ireland , familiar manager for Earth chemistry at The Australian National University in Canberra says the cannister does n’t look contaminated , so he feels there ’s a just hazard of indeed find grain that can recite us much about the asteroid .
Still , there ’s a snag – the capture mechanism that was meant to gather up asteroid rock fragments malfunction at the precise moment it was meant to run , so there ’s no reason why anything acquire in there at all . The Jaxa scientists say Habayusa certainly would have kick up a luck of dust when it landed on Itokawa , and that dust must have somehow seeped inside the canister . It might seem like pretty wonky logical thinking , but given the quixotic nature of the Habayusa military mission so far , it seems only appropriate it would cease like this .
[ BBC News ]
AstronomyMad astronomyScienceSpace
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