Monday, November 2, 2026

Researchers May Have Solved a Puzzling Contradiction in the Ryugu Sample

The asteroid Ryugu as imaged by Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft in 2018. Asteroid like Ryugu are like fossils from the Solar System's formation. JAXA's Hayabusa 2 mission returned a sample of Ryugu in 2020, and researchers are still working hard to understand what it has to tell us about the Solar System. Image Credit: By ISAS/JAXA, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=195893287

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and from carbonaceous chondrites that have crashed on Earth, present an apparent contradiction. Their fine-grained matrices have widely varied compositions of their clay-like minerals. That suggests that there were widely different aqueous environments in the same parent bodies, which seems unlikely. But new research may have solved that contradiction.



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