Researchers have confirmed that the sample of material Hayabusa2 brought back from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu matches what was seen on the asteroid’s surface and in areas blasted to reveal the subsurface.

I have to admit, my first reaction to this paper was, “And water is wet.” If you send a spacecraft to an asteroid and grab stuff off its surface, of course, it’s going to match, but then I remembered that Apollo astronauts brought back a meteorite from the surface of the Moon.

So, water is wet, but sometimes we have to prove it because frozen water can be kind of dry. Or, in this case, sometimes bad luck happens, and we have to verify a sample is representative of the whole. And this is a long-winded way of saying that Hayabusa2’s 5-gram sample of Ryugu matches expectations and is representative of the world.

No soap opera plot twists for this asteroid. Not today.

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*Free* Samples brought back from the asteroid Ryugu match its surface and sub-surface (EurekAlert)

“Pebbles and sand on asteroid (162173) Ryugu: In situ observation and particles returned to Earth,” S. Tachibana et al., 2022 February 10, Science