Asteroid Ryugu

• Two organic compounds essential for living organisms have been detected in the sample of the asteroid Ryugu.
• The samples were brought back on Japan’s Hayabusa 2 space craft.
• A study of samples claims to have discovered evidence that points to organic matter from comets being transported from space to regions near Earth.
• The sample surfaces contain “melt splashes” ranging from 5 to 20 micrometers.
• These splashes could have been created when Ryugu got bombarded by micrometeoroids of cometary dust.

ABOUT ASTEROID RYUGU

• It is a diamond-shaped carbonaceous or C-type asteroid (meaning it contains a lot of carbon and water).
• The name means “dragon palace” in Japanese and refers to a magical underwater castle in a Japanese folktale.
• It was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, a collaborative, U.S.-based project to catalogue and track space rocks.
• It is about 900m in diameter.
• It is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars and occasionally crosses Earth’s orbit
• It has been classified as “potentially hazardous”.
• Ryugu does not have a protective atmosphere and its surface is directly exposed to space.
  • This means that small interplanetary dust in space can hit the surface of the asteroid, making changes to its composition and even depositing surface materials.

ABOUT HAYABUSA 2 MISSION

• Hayabusa2 is a Japanese spacecraft that explored asteroid Ryugu from June 2018 to November 2019.
• It dispatched a series of landers and a penetrator, and it collected multiple samples from the asteroid.
• Timeline- Launched in 2014, arrived on Ryugu in 2018 and brought back samples on earth in 2020.
• Hayabusa2 deployed the first rovers to operate on an asteroid.
• The spacecraft is now on an extended mission to the asteroid 1998KY26.