See multiple views from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft's touching down on asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Credit: JAXA/U. Tokyo/Kochi ...

A simple dust grain brought back from asteroid Ryugu is shaking up certain certainties. A rare mineral, djerfisherite, was unexpectedly identified there by a Japanese team. The mineral ...

For the study, the researchers identified the mineral djerfisherite, which contains potassium, iron, and nickel, and surprised the researchers with its appearance as the presence of djerfisherite ...

A surprising discovery from a tiny grain of asteroid Ryugu has rocked scientists' understanding of how our Solar System evolved. Researchers found djerfisherite—a mineral typically born in ...

Miyahara and colleagues spotted Ryugu’s djerfisherite while using field-emission transmission electron microscopy (FE-TEM) to better understand how terrestrial weathering affected the asteroid ...

The pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission on December 6, 2020, have been vital to improving the understanding of primitive asteroids and the formation of the solar ...

Ryugu is now 900 meters (3,000 feet) across, but it was originally part of a much larger parent body. This bygone world, formed between 1.8 to 2.9 million years after the beginning of the Solar ...

Serendipitous discovery of djerfisherite in Ryugu grain challenges current paradigm of the nature of primitive asteroids. The pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission ...

The samples were gathered from two touchdowns that Hayabusa2 made last year on Ryugu. The landings were more difficult than expected because of the asteroid’s extremely rocky surface.

TOKYO—Japan’s space agency said it recovered far more black dirt than it was targeting from the asteroid Ryugu, confirming the success of its Hayabusa2 mission nine days after it delivered its ...

Sodium carbonates on Ryugu as evidence of highly saline water in the outer Solar System. Nature Astronomy, 2024; 8 (12): 1536 DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02418-1 ...

According to Miyahara, the discovery “challenges the notion that Ryugu is compositionally uniform” and opens new questions about primitive asteroid evolution.