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If you visit one of our public exhibits of the sample from asteroid Ryugu in Japan, or in collaboration with the Science Museum in the UK or Cité de l’espace in France, you’re looking at a genuine piece of our planet’s past: a grain that has been sealed in pure nitrogen while in a clean chamber within the JAXA curation facility, and which was carried to Earth in a specialised container sealed so tight that it even trapped the first gas sample ever collected from deep space! Every step of the Hayabusa2 mission, from the nitrogen purging of the spacecraft components during construction, to curation rooms where not even paper can be taken inside, has been designed to stop any trace of the Earth’s environment altering this asteroid sample. This reported contamination of a grain loaned by JAXA shows the importance of all the steps taken by the team to deliver
a sample unchanged for 4.56 billion years! -- Elizabeth Tasker, Dept. of Solar System Science