Why Perth scientists are hoping to score asteroid fragments brought back to Earth by an ambitious space mission.<\/p>\n
When Japanese space mission Hayabusa2<\/a> lands on the asteroid Ryugu mid-year, Associate Professor Fred Jourdan will be watching very closely.<\/p>\n The Â鶹ֱ²¥ earth and planetary scientist saw the mission launch live in Japan in 2014 and is hoping to score pieces of the asteroid when Hayabusa2 returns to Earth.<\/p>\n He wants to shoot the asteroid samples with a laser beam and vaporise them.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all in the name of discovering more about our Solar System.<\/p>\n If Hayabusa2 is successful in collecting fragments from Ryugu, they will be among the most valuable dust particles on the planet.<\/p>\n But Fred and his colleagues have good reason to believe they might be awarded access.<\/p>\n In 2012, the team successfully bid for two grains from the asteroid Itokawa collected by the Japanese space agency (JAXA) mission.<\/p>\n These precious samples\u2014the first and only particles ever collected from an asteroid\u2014were analysed by Fred using specialised equipment at the John de Laeter Centre in Bentley.<\/p>\n \u201cWe proposed to date the samples, but because they were so small, there were very few\u2014if any\u2014 other labs in the world that could do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe samples\u2014they are the width of the human hair, they were less than 100 microns, which is very, very challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n Itokawa is more of a peanut-shaped pile of rubble than a traditional boulder asteroid, and it has a violent past.<\/p>\n Fred\u2019s research<\/a>, published last year, showed that the asteroid was likely battered by a series of collisions that caused it to internally fragment.<\/p>\n One final impact caused the asteroid to shatter.<\/p>\n Fred\u2019s success meant he was awarded four more samples from Itokawa, despite the fact that he destroyed the first two.<\/p>\n \u201cThe argon-argon technique, which dates the sample, needs to completely vaporise and fuse the sample to release the gas that is trapped inside,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo those two grains, they\u2019ve been lasered to oblivion, but JAXA were OK with that. It\u2019s not like we didn\u2019t tell them.\u201d<\/p>\n JAXA says Hayabusa2 has a lofty goal to \u201celucidate the secrets of the creation of life and the birth of the Solar System\u201d.<\/p>\n (No pressure Fred.)<\/p>\n But it will be a couple of years before we know if the mission to Ryugu is successful, with the return samples due back on Earth at the end of 2020.<\/p>\n Fred is also hoping a collaboration with China might mean he can get his hands on new samples from the Moon.<\/p>\n In the meantime though, he\u2019ll have to entertain himself with more earthly dust fragments.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very interested by volcanoes and eruptions and lava flows, so I have PhD students working in different volcanic provinces around the world,\u201d Fred says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re working on the relation between large volcanic eruptions in the past and previous mass extinctions.\u201d<\/p>\n The John de Laeter Centre is a collaborative research venture involving Â鶹ֱ²¥, UWA, the Geological Survey of WA and CSIRO.<\/p>\n This article was originally published on Particle<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why Perth scientists are hoping to score asteroid fragments brought back to Earth by an ambitious space mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4275,"featured_media":6626,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-6625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":{"title":"\u200bMichelle Wheeler","url":"#","target":""},"photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Asteroid-Fragments.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Curtin","last_name":"University","display_name":"Â鶹ֱ²¥"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 09:09:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4275"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6625"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=6625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Rendezvous with an extraterrestrial rock<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A violent past<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The waiting game<\/strong><\/h2>\n