Former AMGC PhD Dr. Ryoga Maeda returned this week with samples from the Hayabusa 2 asteroid sampling mission. The mission launched in 2014 by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA brought back several grams of material from C-type Asteroid 162173 Ryugu. The spacecraft encountered Ryugu in June 2018, it sampled this near-Earth asteroid during touch down in 2019, and returned the samples to Earth in 2020. These unique extraterrestrial samples are now being analyzed in the top cosmochemistry laboratories worldwide to decipher the Solar System's early evolution and planetary formation processes.
At AMGC, under the leadership of Professor Steven Goderis, the aim is to analyze the composition of trace elements in different mineral phases from these extraterrestrial fragments of distant small planetary bodies. This is done using state-of-the-art laser ablation inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry mapping. The proposed work occurs together with Professor Frank Vanhaecke and Dr. Thibaut Van Acker from the Atomic and Mass Spectrometry unit at Ghent University.
Visit the Hayabusa mission website at NASA for more information.
