The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced Thursday that it has confirmed the presence of rocks in the Hayabusa2 capsule brought back to Earth, which were collected at the time of the space probe's second landing on the asteroid Ryugu in July last year.
JAXA will examine the rocks, which it suspects are subterranean samples from Ryugu.
The capsule has a small box for holding samples, which is divided into three compartments in order to separate samples collected at each landing.
On Monday, JAXA opened the compartment containing samples from the second landing and found a number of black rocks, some almost 1 centimeter in size. That is quite large in comparison with rocks and sand taken during the first landing, which were only about 5 millimeters in size.
Prior to the second landing in April last year, JAXA fired a metal clump into Ryugu to expose underground matter. It is possible that such matter is among the samples being examined this time.
The subterranean matter is not affected by heat from the sun or cosmic rays, and is thought to hold much information from the early period of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
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