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

Journal Reference: Matthew J. Genge et al, Rapid colonization of a space‐returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms, Meteoritics & Planetary Science (2024). DOI: 10.1111/maps.14288 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

In November 2022 Matthew Genge was peering through a scanning electron microscope at a millimeter-sized speck of the asteroid Ryugu when he noticed something was off. A minuscule yet unmistakable ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...