The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2, after flying a 5.2 billion kilometre mission (3.2 billion miles) returned to Earth and dropped a small space capsule containing the first-ever sub-surface samples from asteroid Ryugu. During its descent, the 40cm capsule turned into a fireball streaming across the night sky and landed safely in Woomera, South Australia.
On Sunday, a helicopter search team was deployed into the Australian bush to locate and recover the capsule in the planned landing area. The retrieval of the pan-shaped capsule, about 15 inches in diameter, was completed after two hours. The return of the capsule with the world’s first asteroid subsurface samples comes weeks after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a successful touch-and-go grab of surface samples from asteroid Bennu.
China, meanwhile, announced this week its lunar lander collected underground samples and sealed them within the spacecraft for return to Earth, as space developing nations compete in their missions. Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American astrophysicist and the associated administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, congratulated the Japan space agency and “the many individuals in Japan and beyond who made this possible.”