Capsule with asteroid samples in 'perfect' shape

bbc.com

21 points·pseudolus··8 comments

Why is he wearing that particular suit? Radiation exposure? Seems something very similar to what bomb disposals usually wear.

From the Twitter thread linked by yoquan:

> Explosives were used to deploy the parachute, so care had to be taken that there were no late detonations. [0]

Precisely what you guessed it to guessed it to be.

[0]:https://mobile.twitter.com/girlandkat/status/133551478006118...

Did I understand correctly from the article that the sample size is only 100 milligrams?

"More than 100 mg". And that was the mission intent. They won't know if they achieved it until they open the box and weigh the contents.

But 100mg is less than a single dust speckle.. big box for a small flake

I think your math is a bit off. 1 gram of water = 1 cubic cm. Rock is more dense, maybe by a factor of 5. So 100 mg of rock would be 2% of a cc. That's tiny - much smaller than I expected for the mission - but it's still a lot bigger than a dust speck.

Turns out getting material from a celestial object back to terra-firma unaltered is pretty damn hard. Fortunately, modern scientific instruments can do a lot with a little.

Hayabusa-2 is the first of its kind successful mission. And it got congrats from Elon Musk too! [1] Looking forward to new discoveries about early Solar System from the asteroid sample it brought back.

[1] https://twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa/status/1335513393122316288

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