Chinese scientists have found a new lunar mineral in the form of a crystal lurking inside samples collected from the moon in 2020.
Changesite–(Y), named for the mythological Chinese goddess of the moon, Chang’e, is a phosphate mineral and columnar crystal. It was found in lunar basalt particles being examined in laboratories in China.
The discovery was made by researchers at the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology who found a single crystal of Changesite–(Y) using X-ray diffraction while studying particles collected on the moon.
Related: The latest news about China’s space program
The finding was announced at a press conference on Sept. 9. The Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC (opens in new tab)) of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA) confirmed it as a new mineral, according (opens in new tab)to Chinese state media Global Times.
The discovery means China is the third country to discover a new lunar mineral, following the United States and former Soviet Union, which conducted the Apollo crewed lunar landings and Luna sample return missions, respectively.
The Chang’e 5 mission landed in Oceanus Procellarum in December 2020 and was the first lunar sample return mission since the 1970s.
The mission collected 3.81 lbs (1.73 kilograms) of lunar samples and delivered them safely to Earth for study, leading to a range of discoveries.
China’s next moon mission is expected to be Chang’e 6. It will attempt to collect the first samples from the far side of the moon which never faces the Earth.
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Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu. Credit: JAXA
Asteroids from the outer Solar System may have brought the building blocks of life to Earth.
New research has revealed important new clues as to how the inner Solar System, including Earth, acquired its water and organic-rich components – the essential building blocks for all life.
The Kochi Team2 has undertaken a detailed study of eight particles returned to Earth from asteroid ‘Ryugu’ by the
Asteroids from the outer Solar System may have brought the building blocks of life to Earth. Credit: Phase2 Kochi/JAXA
In fact, the material contains a lot of water and organic matter. OU experts were able to confirm that the Ryugu samples are very similar to meteorites of the CI (Ivuna-type) chondrite group. These are considered the most important single meteorite group because they have a composition that matches that of our Solar System. They were also able to show that CI chondrites have been contaminated by their interaction with the terrestrial environment.
Because the Ryugu samples were collected and returned to Earth in ultra-clean conditions, they are the most pristine, primitive Solar System samples that we have.
‘More precious than gold dust’
The OU team was comprised of Richard Greenwood, Ross Findlay, Ian Franchi, and James Malley.
Richard Greenwood is a Research Fellow at the OU and supported the study through isotope analysis. Dr. Greenwood explained the importance of the research:
“When Asteroid Ryugu was surveyed in space by the Haybusa2 spacecraft it looked as though the results from the mission might be a bit disappointing. It seemed that materials from which the asteroid was composed had been heated to a high temperature and much of the water stored in them had been lost to space.
“However, while working as part of the Japanese Kochi Team, OU scientists were able to demonstrate that the Ryugu samples were closely similar to the important and unheated CI (Ivuna-type) chondrites. These are materials that have a composition that closely matches that of the Solar System itself, including the Sun. For understanding the chemistry of the Solar System it turns out that the Ryugu materials are more precious gold dust.”
Despite the material from Ryugu being aqueous (of or containing water), low temperatures mean the primary relationships between its minerals and the organic component have been preserved. Isotopic evidence (hydrogen and nitrogen) indicates that the fine-grained minerals and organics seen in the Ryugu particles formed in the outer Solar System.
Because of this study, experts have been able to conclude that materials in primitive asteroids may have acted as ‘cradles’ for organic molecules. This would have helped to preserve them and so provides a potential mechanism for the coupled delivery of water and organics to the early Earth.
Reference: “A pristine record of outer Solar System materials from asteroid Ryugu’s returned sample” by Motoo Ito, Naotaka Tomioka, Masayuki Uesugi, Akira Yamaguchi, Naoki Shirai, Takuji Ohigashi, Ming-Chang Liu, Richard C. Greenwood, Makoto Kimura, Naoya Imae, Kentaro Uesugi, Aiko Nakato, Kasumi Yogata, Hayato Yuzawa, Yu Kodama, Akira Tsuchiyama, Masahiro Yasutake, Ross Findlay, Ian A. Franchi, James A. Malley, Kaitlyn A. McCain, Nozomi Matsuda, Kevin D. McKeegan, Kaori Hirahara, Akihisa Takeuchi, Shun Sekimoto, Ikuya Sakurai, Ikuo Okada, Yuzuru Karouji, Masahiko Arakawa, Atsushi Fujii, Masaki Fujimoto, Masahiko Hayakawa, Naoyuki Hirata, Naru Hirata, Rie Honda, Chikatoshi Honda, Satoshi Hosoda, Yu-ichi Iijima, Hitoshi Ikeda, Masateru Ishiguro, Yoshiaki Ishihara, Takahiro Iwata, Kosuke Kawahara, Shota Kikuchi, Kohei Kitazato, Koji Matsumoto, Moe Matsuoka, Tatsuhiro Michikami, Yuya Mimasu, Akira Miura, Osamu Mori, Tomokatsu Morota, Satoru Nakazawa, Noriyuki Namiki, Hirotomo Noda, Rina Noguchi, Naoko Ogawa, Kazunori Ogawa, Tatsuaki Okada, Chisato Okamoto, Go Ono, Masanobu Ozaki, Takanao Saiki, Naoya Sakatani, Hirotaka Sawada, Hiroki Senshu, Yuri Shimaki, Kei Shirai, Seiji Sugita, Yuto Takei, Hiroshi Takeuchi, Satoshi Tanaka, Eri Tatsumi, Fuyuto Terui, Ryudo Tsukizaki, Koji Wada, Manabu Yamada, Tetsuya Yamada, Yukio Yamamoto, Hajime Yano, Yasuhiro Yokota, Keisuke Yoshihara, Makoto Yoshikawa, Kent Yoshikawa, Ryota Fukai, Shizuho Furuya, Kentaro Hatakeda, Tasuku Hayashi, Yuya Hitomi, Kazuya Kumagai, Akiko Miyazaki, Masahiro Nishimura, Hiromichi Soejima, Ayako Iwamae, Daiki Yamamoto, Miwa Yoshitake, Toru Yada, Masanao Abe, Tomohiro Usui, Sei-ichiro Watanabe and Yuichi Tsuda, 15 August 2022, Nature Astronomy. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01745-5
Water may have been brought to Earth by asteroids from the outer edges of the solar system, scientists said after analyzing rare samples collected on a six-year Japanese space mission.
In a quest to shed light on the origins of life and the formation of the universe, researchers are scrutinizing material brought back to earth in 2020 from the asteroid Ryugu.
Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe, which is roughly the size of a refrigerator, launched in December 2014, landing on the diamond-shaped asteroid Ryugu, which means “dragon palace” in Japanese, located 185 million miles away. When it plummeted to Earth in 2020, the capsule provided a stunning show above the Australian outback, streaking across the sky as a dazzling fireball.
Photographs of the fireball captured on-site. Welcome back. (Collection Team M)#Hayabusa2#はやぶさ２#AsteroidExplorerHayabusa2 #HAYA2Report pic.twitter.com/b2ThFi33q5
— HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) December 5, 2020
The 5.4 grams (0.2 ounces) of rocks and dust were gathered by the Japanese space probe that landed on the celestial body and fired an “impactor” into its surface.
Studies on the material are beginning to be published, and in June, one group of researchers said they had found organic material which showed that some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have been formed in space.
In a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists said the Ryugu samples could give clues to the mystery of how oceans appeared on Earth billions of years ago.
“Volatile and organic-rich C-type asteroids may have been one of the main sources of Earth’s water,” said the study by scientists from Japan and other countries, published Monday.
“The delivery of volatiles (that is, organics and water) to the Earth is still a subject of notable debate,” it said.
But the organic materials found “in Ryugu particles, identified in this study, probably represent one important source of volatiles.”
The scientists hypothesized that such material probably has an “outer Solar System origin”, but said it was “unlikely to be the only source of volatiles delivered to the early Earth.”
In the Nature Astronomy study, the researchers again hailed the findings made possible by the mission.
“Ryugu particles are undoubtedly among the most uncontaminated Solar System materials available for laboratory study and ongoing investigations of these precious samples will certainly expand our understanding of early Solar System processes,” the study said.
The NASA OSIRIS-REx mission collected a sample from another near-Earth asteroid — Bennu, which is similar to Ryugu. The sample will return to Earth in 2023.
This Nov. 13, 2019, file image released by JAXA, shows asteroid Ryugu taken by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft.
“We are dealing with a trifecta. Covid is still very much here. Polio, we have identified polio in our sewage. And we’re still dealing with the monkey pox crisis,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said Friday on CNN’s New Day. “We’re addressing the threats as they come before us and we’re prepared to deal with them and with the assistance of Washington, DC.”
In a statement about the wastewater finding, New York officials underscored the urgency of staying up to date with polio immunizations, particularly for those in the greater New York metro area.
Most people in the US are protected from polio because of vaccination. The primary series of three vaccines provides 99% protection. However, unvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable.
“For every one case of paralytic polio identified, hundreds more may be undetected,” State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett said. “The detection of poliovirus in wastewater samples in New York City is alarming, but not surprising.”
The virus most commonly spreads through feces, and in less common circumstances, when a person infected with the poliovirus sneezes or coughs. About 90% of people with polio do not have any visible symptoms, according to the World Health Organization. Some have flu-like symptoms such as sore throat, fever, tiredness and nausea.
About 1 in 25 people will get viral meningitis, an infection of the covering of the spinal cord and/or brain, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 1 in 200 people will experience paralysis and be unable to move parts of their body or will feel a kind of weakness in their arms, legs or both. Even kids who fully recover from the initial disease can develop new muscle pain and weakness years later.
Paralysis can lead to a permanent disability and death, since it can impact the muscles used to breathe.
City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said that with polio circulating in our communities, “there is simply nothing more essential than vaccinating our children to protect them from this virus, and if you’re an unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated adult, please choose now to get the vaccine.”
CDC investigating polio in New York
The wastewater finding comes after the identification of a case of paralytic polio in a Rockland County, New York, resident on July 21, and the detection in wastewater samples in May, June and July from Rockland and Orange counties.
A CDC official told CNN this week that the case in Rockland County was “just the very, very tip of the iceberg” and suggested there “must be several hundred cases in the community circulating.”
The agency sent a team of disease detectives to Rockland County last week to investigate the case and assist with vaccination. A community health leader who has met with the team told CNN the investigators are “quite nervous” that polio “could mushroom out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands.”
Prior to the invention of the vaccine, polio was considered “one of the most feared diseases in the United States,” according to the CDC. In the 1940s it disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. Once the polio vaccine became available in 1955, case numbers dropped significantly.
The last case in the US was reported nearly a decade ago.
Officials say routine vaccine coverage has fallen among New York City children since 2019, noting only 86.2% of NYC children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years old have received three doses of the polio vaccine, meaning nearly 14% are not fully protected.
Some children missed vaccination appointments due to the pandemic. Others live in small groups of the ultraorthadox Jewish community in New York, including in Rockland County, that have made a decision not to vaccinate their children. Others in the religious Jewish community in Rockland have embraced efforts to work with public health officials to educate those who refuse to vaccinate their children.
In some New York City neighborhoods, the vaccination rate is significantly lower than in the rest of the city. In Williamsburg, for instance only 56.3% of children are vaccinated. In Battery Park City it’s 58%. In Bedford-Stuyvesant/Ocean Hill/Brownsville it’s 58.4%. Nationally, the vaccination rate for children is nearly 93%.
“The risk to New Yorkers is real but the defense is so simple – get vaccinated against polio,” said Vasan, the health commissioner. “Polio is entirely preventable and its reappearance should be a call to action for all of us.”
CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen, Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
Kateryna Kon | Science Photo Library | Getty Images
Polio has been found in wastewater samples taken from two counties outside of New York City indicating the virus is spreading in the community, according to state health officials.
Wastewater samples taken from two different locations in Orange County during June and July tested positive for the virus, according to the New York State Department of Health.
The findings come after an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County contracted polio, suffered paralysis and had to be hospitalized last month. Polio was subsequently found in Rockland County wastewater samples. Rockland County neighbors Orange County.
“These environmental findings — which further indicate potential community spread — in addition to the paralytic polio case identified among a Rockland County resident, underscore the urgency of every New York adult and child getting immunized against polio, especially those in the greater New York metropolitan area,” New York health officials said.
The polio strain the adult in Rockland County caught suggests the chain of transmission did not begin in the United States. The strain the individual contracted is used in the oral polio vaccine, which contains a mild version of the virus that can still replicate. This means people who receive the oral vaccine can spread the virus to others.
But the U.S. hasn’t used the oral polio vaccine in more than 20 years. The U.S. uses an inactivated polio vaccine that is administered as shot in the leg or arm. The vaccine uses a non-replicating virus strain, which means people who receive the shot cannot infect other people.
The polio case in New York is genetically linked to the Rockland County wastewater sample as well as samples from the greater Jerusalem area in Israel and London in the United Kingdom. Health authorities in the U.K. declared a national incident in June after they detected polio in London sewage samples.
“New Yorkers should know that this does not imply that the individual case identified in Rockland County, New York has travel history to Israel or the UK,” the New York state health department said.
No polio cases have originated in the U.S. since 1979 and the nation has been considered polio free since then, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio caused widespread fear in the 1940s before vaccines were available. The virus disabled more than 35,000 people every year during that time, according to the CDC.
But a successful vaccination campaign in the 1950s and 1960s dramatically reduced the number of infections. Polio cases are still reported in the U.S., but they are linked to travelers who bring the virus into the country. The case in Rockland County is the first time the U.S. has confirmed an infection since 2013. New York state last confirmed an infection in 1990.
As Perseverance investigates the site of an ancient lake that existed billions of years ago, it’s collecting rocks and soil. This material is of interest because it could contain evidence of past microscopic organisms that would reveal whether life ever existed on Mars. Scientists will have the chance to use some of the most sophisticated instruments around the world to study these precious samples.
The ambitious Mars Sample Return program involves collaboration between the two agencies to retrieve 30 samples from the red planet. Multiple missions will launch to Mars later this decade to safely pick up and bring the samples back.
The program is nearing the end of its conceptual design phase, and NASA has completed its system requirements review. The review has led to changes that will reduce the complexity of future missions and increase probability of success, according to NASA officials.
“The conceptual design phase is when every facet of a mission plan gets put under a microscope,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “There are some significant and advantageous changes to the plan, which can be directly attributed to Perseverance’s recent successes at Jezero and the amazing performance of our Mars helicopter.”
Initially, the plan was to launch a fetch rover along with a Sample Retrieval Lander in the mid-2020s. Once released on the Martian surface, the fetch rover would have retrieved samples from where Perseverance has stashed them on the Martian surface.
Now, Perseverance will be the primary transport vehicle to carry samples to the lander. The rover’s latest health and life expectancy assessment shows that it should still be in prime condition to deliver the samples itself in 2030. Perseverance will back up to the lander, and the lander’s robotic arm will transfer the samples.
The Sample Retrieval Lander will carry two sample recovery helicopters, similar in style to the Ingenuity helicopter currently on Mars — rather than a fetch rover.
“Recent operations of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, which has completed 29 flights — 24 more than originally planned — have shown us the usefulness of potential rotorcraft of Mars,” said Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return Program.
Engineers have been impressed with Ingenuity’s performance. The helicopter has survived more than a year beyond its expected life span. In the event that Perseverance can’t return the samples to the lander, the little choppers will be able to fly away from the lander, use arms to retrieve the samples and bring them back.
The two sample return helicopters will be similar in size to Ingenuity but will be a little bit heavier. The landing legs will come equipped with small mobility wheels to allow it to travel on the ground as well as fly, and each chopper will have a little arm that can grab sample tubes, said Richard Cook, Mars Sample Return program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
If Perseverance’s health remains the same over the next eight years and it doesn’t need any help in returning samples to the lander, the choppers could observe and capture images of the process.
Getting samples back to Earth
The Sample Retrieval Lander also carries the Mars Ascent Vehicle — the first rocket that will ever launch from the Martian surface, with the samples tucked safely inside. The spacecraft is currently set to launch from Mars in 2031.
A separate mission will launch from Earth in the mid-2020s, called the Earth Return Orbiter, to rendezvous with the Mars Ascent Vehicle.
Onboard the Earth Return Orbiter is the Capture/Containment and Return System, which will collect the container of samples from the Mars Ascent Vehicle while both vehicles are in orbit around Mars.
The Earth Return Orbiter will then head back to our world. Once the spacecraft is close to Earth, it will release the Earth Entry Vehicle that contains the cache of samples, and that spacecraft will touchdown on Earth in 2033.
Previously, the agency said the samples could return to Earth by 2031, but the planned launch dates for the orbiter in fall 2027 and the lander in summer 2028 have created the new arrival date.
Engineers are currently testing robotic components for the campaign at NASA and ESA centers. The Mars Sample Return program will move into the preliminary design phase in October, which will last for about a year. The design phase will result in technology development as well as engineering prototypes for the main components.
“ESA is continuing at full speed the development of both the Earth Return Orbiter that will make the historic round-trip from Earth to Mars and back again; and the Sample Transfer Arm that will robotically place the sample tubes aboard the Orbiting Sample Container before its launch from the surface of the Red Planet,” said David Parker, ESA director of human and robotic exploration, in a statement.
Diverse samples
The Perseverance rover has collected 11 rock core samples so far. The samples represent “an amazing suite of materials,” said Meenakshi Wadhwa, principal scientist for Mars Sample Return and director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
“The latest one, in fact, is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that has the greatest potential for preserving biosignatures, potentially, and so we have a diversity of materials already in the bag, so to speak, and really excited about the potential for bringing these back,” Wadhwa said.
“Working together on historic endeavors like Mars Sample Return not only provides invaluable data about our place in the universe but brings us closer together right here on Earth,” Zurbuchen said.
Living as a microbe on the Tibetan Plateau isn’t easy. Frigid temperatures, high levels of solar radiation, not a lot to eat, and you’d regularly get frozen and then thawed depending on the time of year.
So, it’s a bit of a surprise that in these ‘extreme environmental conditions’ scientists have discovered 968 species featuring a hugely diverse range of microbes. The finding comes courtesy of the first dedicated genome catalog of the glacier ecosystem.
“The surfaces of glaciers support a diverse array of life, including bacteria, algae, archaea, fungi, and other microeukaryotes. Microorganisms have demonstrated the ability to adapt to these extreme conditions and contribute to vital ecological processes,” writes the team in their new paper.
“Glacier ice can also act as a record of microorganisms from the past, with ancient (more than 10,000 years old) airborne microorganisms being successfully revived. Therefore, the glacial microbiome also constitutes an invaluable chronology of microbial life on our planet.”
The researchers honed in on one specific group of glaciers – the Tibetan Plateau. This 2.5 million square kilometer region is an important water source for the surrounding areas in Asia and has been particularly affected by climate change, with over 80 percent of glaciers having started to retreat.
Not only is it important for us to know which microbes are up there (just in case they could be a problem for humans and the ecosystem as the ice melts), but if we don’t note what species are currently there, climate change might soon make them lost to history.
“Here we present the first, to our knowledge, dedicated genome and gene catalog for glacier ecosystems, comprising 3,241 genomes and metagenome-assembled genomes and 25 million non-redundant proteins from 85 Tibetan glacier metagenomes and 883 cultivated isolates,” the team, led by Lanzhou University ecologist Yongqin Liu, writes in their paper.
The researchers undertook a mammoth effort, sampling snow, ice, and dust from 21 Tibetan glaciers between 2016 and 2020. They used metagenomic methods on the samples to collect all of the genetic material present; they also cultured some of the microbes in a lab to find out more about them and to retrieve a higher proportion of their genome.
Excitingly, 82 percent of the genomes were novel species. A whopping 11 percent of species were found only in one glacier, while 10 percent were located in almost all the glaciers studied.
The project has become what the researchers are calling the ‘Tibetan Glacier Genome and Gene’ (TG2G) catalog, and hopefully this will be of use for researchers in the future, with new additions as more species are found.
“The TG2G catalog offers a database and a platform for archiving, analysis and comparison of glacier microbiomes at the genome and gene levels. It is particularly timely as the glacier ecosystem is threatened by global warming, and glaciers are retreating at an unprecedented rate,” the team writes.
“We envisage that the catalog will form the basis of a comprehensive global repository for glacial microbiome data.”
The research has been published in Nature Biotechnology.
When people with metastatic breast cancer close their eyes at night, their cancer awakes and starts to spread.
That’s the striking finding from a paper published in Nature this week that overturns the assumption that breast cancer metastasis happens at the same rate around the clock.
The result may change the way that doctors collect blood samples from people with cancer in the future, the researchers say.
“In our view, these findings may indicate the need for healthcare professionals to systematically record the time at which they perform biopsies,” says senior author Nicola Aceto, a professor of molecular oncology at ETH Zurich.
“It may help to make the data truly comparable.”
Researchers first stumbled across this topic when they noticed an unexplained difference in the number of circulating tumor cells in samples analyzed at different times of the day.
“Some of my colleagues work early in the morning or late in the evening; sometimes they’ll also analyze blood at unusual hours,” Aceto says.
Mice that seemed to have a much higher number of circulating cancer cells than humans provided another clue: Mice sleep during the day when blood samples are most often taken.
To investigate what was going on, the Swiss researchers studied 30 women with breast cancer (21 patients with early breast cancer that had not metastasized and nine patients with stage IV metastatic disease).
They found “a striking and unexpected pattern”: Most circulating tumor cells (78.3 percent) were found in blood samples that were taken at nighttime while a much lower amount was found in daytime samples.
When the researchers injected mice with breast cancer cells and took blood samples during the day, they found the same result. Circulating tumor cells were much higher when the mouse was at rest.
Interestingly, the cancer cells collected during the rest period were “highly prone to metastasize, whereas circulating tumor cells generated during the active phase are devoid of metastatic ability”, the researchers said.
Genetic analysis revealed that tumor cells taken from mice and humans at rest had upregulated their expression of mitotic genes. This makes them better at metastasizing as mitotic genes control cell division.
The researchers ran experiments where they gave some mice jet lag by changing the light-dark routine. Messing with the circadian rhythm led to a massive decrease in the concentration of circulating tumor cells in mice.
In another experiment, the researchers tested whether giving the mice hormones that were similar to those found in the body when mice are awake would affect the number of circulating tumor cells when the mouse was at rest.
They injected mice with testosterone, insulin (a hormone that makes it possible to turn sugar into energy), and dexamethasone (a synthetic chemical that acts like cortisol, the stress hormone).
The researchers found a “marked reduction” in the number of circulating tumor cells in a blood sample taken during the rest period (when the tumor would normally be most aggressive).
“Our research shows that the escape of circulating cancer cells from the original tumor is controlled by hormones such as melatonin, which determine our rhythms of day and night,” says Zoi Diamantopoulou, the study’s first author and a molecular oncology researcher at ETH Zurich.
China plans to haul Mars samples to Earth in 2031, two years before NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) aim to do so, according to media reports.
The target date was announced in a Monday (June 20) presentation (opens in new tab) by Sun Zezhou, chief designer of the Tianwen 1 Mars orbiter and rover mission that arrived at the Red Planet in February 2021, according to SpaceNews (opens in new tab).
Zezhou’s presentation, reportedly given at a Nanjing University seminar, says China is targeting a two-launch mission with liftoff in late 2028 and a sample return to Earth in July 2031, the report said.
Related: Amazing panorama shows China’s Chang’e 5 landing site on the moon (photos)
“The complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites,” SpaceNews wrote.
NASA recently asked for public input on its joint sample return plans, after the agency decided to develop a second Mars lander due to the mass requirements of the mission. Adding that second lander pushes the arrival of Mars samples on Earth back to 2033, from 2031.
The NASA-ESA campaign will haul home samples collected by the American space agency’s Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater since February 2021. The project will employ a European-built “fetch” rover to grab the samples and place them aboard an American-made Mars ascent vehicle (MAV). The MAV will launch the sample container into Mars orbit, where it will be snagged by a European Earth return orbiter.
This image of China’s Mars rover Zhurong and its tracks, captured on March 11, 2022 by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows that the rover inspected the backshell and parachute that helped it land safely in May 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
China’s effort will be more streamlined, with dirt and rock collected from one small area via “surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot,” SpaceNews wrote.
China already has experience in delivering samples from the moon. The nation’s Chang’e 5 mission touched down on the moon in December 2020 and shortly after delivered to Earth the first lunar samples since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 did so in 1976.
And China already has considerable Mars experience thanks to Tianwen 1, which launched in July 2020 and arrived at the Red Planet in February 2021. Tianwen 1 consists of an orbiter as well as a lander and a rover, called Zhurong; this latter duo touched down in May 2021.
The Tianwen 1 orbiter and Zhurong are both still going strong. The rover entered a planned hibernation in May of this year to attempt to outlast the bitterly cold Red Planet winter.
In 2021, both NASA officials and members of the administration of President Joe Biden warned that Chinese exploration may pose a threat to American interests.
During a May 2021 virtual Senate hearing, for example, NASA chief Bill Nelson twice showed a printed-out picture of Zhurong on Mars, saying the Chinese program is “adding a new element about whether we want to be serious” about NASA sending humans back to the moon. NASA has a program, Artemis, that aims to put boots on the lunar surface in 2025 or so.
Scientifically, however, China has been working to increase its visibility in the space community. It released a high-resolution global map of the moon earlier in June, and in May released plans for its Tianwen 2 asteroid sample return mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2025.
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One-fifth of an ounce of dark specks brought to Earth from an asteroid by a Japanese spacecraft are some of the most pristine bits of a baby solar system ever studied, scientists announced on Thursday.
That fact should help planetary scientists refine their knowledge of the ingredients in the disk of dust and gas that circled the sun about 4.6 billion years ago before coalescing into the planets and smaller bodies.
“We must rewrite the chemistry of the solar system,” said Hisayoshi Yurimoto, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Hokkaido University in Japan and the head of the research analysis described in a paper published by the journal Science on Thursday.
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrived at Ryugu, a carbon-rich asteroid, in 2018. The mission was operated by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and spent more than a year studying Ryugu. That included briefly descending to the surface a couple of times to pick up samples of dirt from the asteroid and even using an explosive to blast a new crater in its surface.
In December 2020, Hayabusa2 flew past Earth again, dropping off a small capsule containing the bits of Ryugu in the Australian outback.
The mission scientists spent last year studying what Hayabusa2 had brought back. “It’s a pile of rocks, pebbles and sand,” said Shogo Tachibana, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo and the principal investigator in charge of the analysis of the samples. The largest piece was about one centimeter, about four-tenths of an inch, in size, he said. Many of the particles were about a millimeter wide.
Dr. Yurimoto’s team received just a smidgen of the asteroid — less than one-200th of an ounce.
The biggest surprise from their analysis is that the bits of Ryugu are a close match to a 1.5-pound meteorite that landed in Tanzania in 1938. The Ivuna meteorite, named after the region it fell in, was of a very rare type. Of the more than 1,000 space rocks that have been found on Earth’s surface, only five are of the this type known as a C.I. chondrite.
(The C stands for carbonaceous, which means containing carbon compounds, and the I stands for Ivuna. A chondrite is a stony meteorite.)
“It’s super similar,” said Sara Russell, the lead of the planetary materials group at the Natural History Museum in London who was a member of the science team on the Hayabusa2 mission as well as a NASA mission, OSIRIS-REX, that visited a different carbon-rich asteroid, Bennu. She was an author on the Science paper.
OSIRIS-REX’s samples from Bennu will arrive back on Earth next year.
Dating of the Ryugu samples indicated that the material formed about 5.2 million years after the birth of the solar system.
Dr. Russell said carbonaceous chondrites were thought to have formed in the outer part of the solar system, farther out than the current orbits of most asteroids. She described them as “basically deep frozen relics from the early solar system.”
CI meteorites possess a makeup of heavier elements very similar to what is measured at the sun’s surface — like the ratios of sodium and sulfur to calcium. Thus, planetary scientists thought these were a good indication of building blocks that filled the early solar system. That provides key parameters for computer models aiming to understand how the planets formed.
The analysis indicated that the material was heated early in its history, melting ice to water, which led to chemical reactions altering the minerals. But the relative amounts of various elements remained almost unchanged, the scientists said.
That fits in with the picture that Ryugu formed out of the rubble that was knocked off a much larger asteroid miles in diameter. (The CI meteorites probably also came from the larger parent asteroid, not Ryugu.)
The results were “very important,” said Victoria Hamilton, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved with the research. “Even though we’ve learned a lot about the early solar system from meteorites here on Earth, they lack any kind of context.”
In this case, planetary scientists know exactly where the samples came from.
The match of Ryugu with CI meteorites was unexpected because CI meteorites contain a lot of water, and Hayabusa2’s remote measurements while at Ryugu indicated the presence of some water but that the surface was mostly dry. The laboratory measurements, however, revealed about 7 percent water, said Dr. Tachibana, a co-author of the new Science study. That is a significant amount for such a mineral.
Dr. Tachibana said scientists were working on understanding the discrepancy.
The scientists also found some differences between the Ryugu samples and the Ivuna meteorite. The Ivuna meteorite included even higher amounts of water and contained minerals known as sulfates that were absent from Ryugu.
The differences could indicate how the mineralogy of the meteorite changed over decades sitting on Earth, absorbing water from the atmosphere and undergoing chemical reactions. That, in turn, could help scientists figure out what formed as part of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago and what changed recently in CI meteorites over a few decades on Earth.
“This shows why it’s important to go and have space missions, to go out and explore and bring back material in a really controlled way,” Dr. Russell said.
This also raises expectations for OSIRIS-REX’s Bennu samples, which will land in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023. Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of that mission, chose that asteroid in large part because it looked like it could be similar to CI meteorites, and OSIRIS-REX’s measurements at Bennu indicated more water than what Hayabusa2 observed at Ryugu. But if Ryugu is already a match for a CI meteorite, that suggests Bennu might be made of something different.
“So now I’m wondering, ‘What are we bringing back?’” said Dr. Lauretta, who was also an author on the Science paper. “It’s kind of exciting, but it’s also intellectually challenging.”
