Hayabusa2 News
Christopher Snead, Hayabusa2 Curator
Volume 4 No. 2 • September 2022
We are pleased to announce the availability of samples of asteroid 162173 Ryugu that were collected by the Japan Aerospace and Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Approximately 5 grams of regolith were returned to Earth on December 6th, 2020 and were transferred to JAXA's Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center (ESCuC) in Sagamihara, Japan. Under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between JAXA and NASA, 500 mg (10%) of the Hayabusa2 returned samples were delivered to Johnson Space Center’s curation facility on December 6th, 2021. Samples were transported to Houston, TX in 28 sealed Facility-to-Facility Transfer Containers (FFTCs), and the sealed containers are currently being stored under a continuous dry N2 purge in the new Hayabusa2 ISO 5 (Class 100) cleanroom facility (Figure 1). Twenty four of the FFTCs contain individual, millimeter-scale samples, and four of the FFTCs contain aggregates of finer scale regolith.
In the nine months since the historic delivery of the samples to Johnson Space Center, the curation staff has been procuring the necessary tools and equipment for sample processing, and has been developing sample handling, storage, and allocation procedures. We expect the delivery of the primary sample processing glovebox in late September 2022 and a second glovebox for micromanipulation activities in November 2022.
The following samples are available for request through NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition & Curation Office:
Information about these samples will be available on the NASA Astromaterials Hayabusa2 page:
https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/hayabusa2/index.cfm
as well as on the JAXA Astromaterials Science Research Group sample catalog page:
https://darts.isas.jaxa.jp/curation/hayabusa2/
We encourage interested parties to consult the sample investigator's guidebook before drafting your sample requests. All sample requests will be reviewed by a subpanel of the Astromaterials Allocation Review Board. As with all of our collections without established request deadlines, we will begin accepting requests for these samples 8 weeks after their announcement in this Newsletter.
Sample requests can be made to:
Christopher Snead
Hayabusa2 Curator
Mail Code XI2
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
2101 NASA Parkway
Houston, TX 77058-3636
U.S.A.
(281) 483-4259
Christopher.j.snead@nasa.gov
Please send any additional questions to christopher.j.snead@nasa.gov.
Figure 1: Model for the layout of the processing and curation equipment within the new Hayabusa2 ISO 5 (Class 100) cleanroom facility.
In the nine months since the historic delivery of the samples to Johnson Space Center, the curation staff has been procuring the necessary tools and equipment for sample processing, and has been developing sample handling, storage, and allocation procedures. We expect the delivery of the primary sample processing glovebox in late September 2022 and a second glovebox for micromanipulation activities in November 2022.
The following samples are available for request through NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition & Curation Office:
Figure 2: Table of Samples are available for request through NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition & Curation Office.
Information about these samples will be available on the NASA Astromaterials Hayabusa2 page:
https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/hayabusa2/index.cfm
as well as on the JAXA Astromaterials Science Research Group sample catalog page:
https://darts.isas.jaxa.jp/curation/hayabusa2/
We encourage interested parties to consult the sample investigator's guidebook before drafting your sample requests. All sample requests will be reviewed by a subpanel of the Astromaterials Allocation Review Board. As with all of our collections without established request deadlines, we will begin accepting requests for these samples 8 weeks after their announcement in this Newsletter.
Sample requests can be made to:
Christopher Snead
Hayabusa2 Curator
Mail Code XI2
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
2101 NASA Parkway
Houston, TX 77058-3636
U.S.A.
(281) 483-4259
Christopher.j.snead@nasa.gov
Please send any additional questions to christopher.j.snead@nasa.gov.