Please do not put your asteroid samples in an airplane's overhead bins.
NASA received a few grains of asteroid dust from Japan's predecessor mission,, which delivered samples from an asteroid called Itokawa in 2010. However, that spacecraft faced serious challenges during the actual mission and ended up bringing very little material back to Earth.
Nakamura-Messenger had planned to fly first to Australia to greet the sample with mission personnel, but stayed home due to the COVID-19 peak occurring at the time. Then, she was meant to visit Japan this year to select NASA's samples and bring them back across the ocean."I was supposed to go to pick up the sample — that's the polite way, because it's a sort of gift from them to us," she said.
So, as with so many other big moments last year, sample selection went digital. Nakamura-Messenger pored through a JAXA database cataloging each sample of asteroid rock from Ryugu, looking for a variety of sizes, colors and textures among the material."We want to keep [the samples] as mysterious as possible, as unprocessed as possible," she said.A scientist analyzes a sample of Ryugu collected by the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft. The logistics were astronomical, so to speak.
The first challenge was getting the unusual cases safely past the Transportation Security Administration ."We had to coordinate with TSA to not disturb the sample," Nakamura-Messenger said."We certainly didn't want samples to go through the X-ray."
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