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The Rigakubu News

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

What did HAYABUSA2 bring back?

Shogo Tachibana (Professor, UTokyo Organization for Planetary and Space Science)

Shogo Tachibana
What did HAYABUSA2 bring back?

Iwanami Shoten (2024)
ISBN 978-4000297240

Hayabusa2, which explored the asteroid Ryuguu, delivered samples to Earth at the end of 2020. Subsequent analysis of the samples revealed one after another the true nature of the materials that make up Ryuguu. I was involved in the Hayabusa2 project from the start-up phase, from the establishment of the scientific objectives of the exploration to the development of the sample collection equipment and sample analysis. The samples will be stored for future use and await analysis by future researchers.

This book introduces why Hayabusa2 set its sights on the asteroid Ryuguu and what we have learned from Ryuguu samples. One of the goals of earth and planetary science is to understand the formation of the solar system and the earth, but to understand the activities of nature far beyond the time and space scales of humans, it is fundamental to examine the "objects" that record those activities. In many cases, the record is preserved in rocks. This is because the types of minerals, chemical compositions, and shapes of rocks reflect the physical and chemical conditions of the external world and have remained unchanged throughout the history of the solar system. In this book, I have attempted to explain how to extract the various information woven into the Ryugyu rocks and why it is possible to deduce the history of Ryugyu and the solar system from this information. If you are more interested in the scriptures brought back from Jersey, rather than the adventures of Sanzo and his group, I hope you will pick up a copy of this book.


 

Published in the September 2024 issue of The Rigakubu News

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