Thursday, October 7, 2010

Hayabusa's asteroid dust update

According to the current reports, the investigation of the Hayabusa sample collection chamber might have yielded tiny grains of the asteroid it visited.

Heroic Hayabusa may have delivered asteroid dust

The 100 or so grains reported yesterday are tiny—micron scale. They were scraped off the sides of the capsule’s inner container with a remote control Teflon spatula, 6 mm long and 3 mm wide, and then examined with an electron microscope.

JAXA researchers say they are not metallic fragments, thereby ruling out the possibility that they came from the capsule itself, but they also say there is no evidence yet to conclude that they are from the asteroid. Still the fact that there were so many particles has given them, and the Japanese public, hope.


The thing is, according to this article, they have not yet opened up the "B" sample chamber, which is the chamber that might have even more dust. So getting anything in the chamber currently under examination would be promising.

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