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Pieces of an asteroid are currently darting into space towards Earth. They are headed for the Australian outback and will land on Sunday 6 December. They come from an ancient asteroid, older than the planets themselves, and in ages past objects like this helped create the Earth. on the living planet it is today. Those pieces of an asteroid are safely stored inside a spacecraft, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Hayabusa2. If all goes according to plan, their impact on the Woomera Testing Range will be delicate. It will be the second time anyone has successfully returned a sample from an asteroid, and the first time one has been returned from an asteroid rich in water and the carbon-based building blocks of life known as organics. The target asteroid was unmemorably named 1999 JU3, but has since been nicknamed Ryugu, named after a dragon’s underwater palace in Japanese folklore. In the story, a fisherman is brought to Ryugu by a turtle and returns with a treasure from the ocean palace, just like Hayabusa2 from our asteroid. If it is a palace, however, it is in ruins. Ryugu appears to be a “pile of rubble” about 900m in diameter, a collection of boulders held together. Asteroids like this one are thought to have originally been part of larger worlds formed from a mixture of ice and rock (i.e. mud), beyond the current asteroid belt. But if they had formed there, what could they have had to do with the history of the Earth? The gravity of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, carves the orbits of objects around them like fingers in spinning clay, gathering clusters of tiny worlds here, emptying regions of space there. When the Solar System first formed, the orbits of the gas giants were still shifting and as they moved they launched many water-rich worlds into the inner planets. The exact amount of Earth’s water arriving this way is still a matter of debate, but it could be that most of our oceans, clouds and rivers owe their presence on Earth to asteroids like Ryugu. In meteorites believed to be similar to Ryugu, complex organic chemicals such as amino acids can be found. This does not mean that life began on asteroids, but the ingredients of life as we know it were raining down on Earth, Mars and Venus shortly after their formation. Gas giants continue to throw at us rocks from the asteroid belt, although much less often these days. The giants crush asteroid orbits until they begin to pass close to Earth, where they become known as Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and, if they actually hit Earth, are called meteorites. Hayabusa2 will pass close to Earth on December 6. He will drop off his sample return case, which will land in Woomera to be picked up by scientists. This Ryugu treasure will reveal fascinating insights into the history of the Solar System and the beginnings of life itself.
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Pieces of an asteroid are currently darting into space towards Earth. They are headed for the Australian outback and will land on Sunday 6 December. They come from an ancient asteroid, older than the planets themselves, and in ages past objects like this helped create the Earth. on the living planet it is today. Those pieces of an asteroid are safely stored inside a spacecraft, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Hayabusa2. If all goes according to plan, their impact on the Woomera Testing Range will be delicate.
It will be the second time anyone has successfully returned a sample from an asteroid, and the first time one has been returned from an asteroid rich in water and the carbon-based building blocks of life known as organics. The target asteroid was unmemorably named 1999 JU3, but has since been nicknamed Ryugu, named after a dragon’s underwater palace in Japanese folklore.
In the story, a fisherman is brought to Ryugu by a turtle and returns with a treasure from the ocean palace, just like Hayabusa2 from our asteroid. If it is a palace, however, it is in ruins. Ryugu appears to be a “pile of rubble” about 900m in diameter, a collection of boulders held together. Asteroids like this one are thought to have originally been part of larger worlds formed from a mixture of ice and rock (i.e. mud), beyond the current asteroid belt. But if they had formed there, what could they have had to do with the history of the Earth? The gravity of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, carves the orbits of objects around them like fingers in spinning clay, gathering clusters of tiny worlds here, emptying regions of space there.
When the Solar System first formed, the orbits of the gas giants were still shifting and as they moved they launched many water-rich worlds into the inner planets. The exact amount of Earth’s water arriving this way is still a matter of debate, but it could be that most of our oceans, clouds and rivers owe their presence on Earth to asteroids like Ryugu. In meteorites believed to be similar to Ryugu, complex organic chemicals such as amino acids can be found.
This does not mean that life began on asteroids, but the ingredients of life as we know it were raining down on Earth, Mars and Venus shortly after their formation. Gas giants continue to throw at us rocks from the asteroid belt, although much less often these days. The giants crush asteroid orbits until they begin to pass close to Earth, where they become known as Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and, if they actually hit Earth, are called meteorites.
Hayabusa2 will pass close to Earth on December 6. He will drop off his sample return case, which will land in Woomera to be picked up by scientists. This Ryugu treasure will reveal fascinating insights into the history of the Solar System and the beginnings of life itself.
- Geoff Bonning is a PhD student in cosmochemistry at ANU’s Research School of Earth Sciences.
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