Elizabeth Tasker
Allow me to fix this @Gizmodo headline:
"Rare asteroid sample contaminated by microorganisms after exposure TO THE AIR"
A team from Imperial College received an asteroid Ryugu grain from JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission. The journal paper states that the sample was absent of Earthy evil when it arrived from JAXA then... they exposed it while sealing in resin 😑
The contamination speed is interesting, but the message here is wrong: proper protocols protect a celestial sample.
Elizabeth Tasker
When that sample capsule hit Earth, the team had 100 hours to scoop that capsule up from the Australian desert and get it sealed away in the curation facilities in JAXA. Beyond that time, there was no guarantee the hermetic seal that was locking out the Earth's atmosphere would hold. They were back in Japan in 57 hours, and the sample capsule was in vacuum for most of that time!
Elizabeth Tasker
Once back in Japan, the asteroid sample was opened in a clean chamber under vacuum or filled with pure nitrogen and which had been scrubbed cleaner than you can ever be and live. When asteroid grains are sent to another research laboratory, they're sealed in nitrogen inside one of the squeak clean chambers.
Elizabeth Tasker
It me 🤸♂️! What fame! When you see a Ryugu grain in a public exhibit, it has been sealed up just like the grains for scientific study. These grains are a chip of the first rock formed in the Solar System before all that planet geo-chem-bio tumbling nonsense gets going. Were these chips key ingredients for the start of life? Could be...
Elizabeth Tasker
The official statement has been released:
Bad things happened to a good asteroid grain, but not on JAXA turf 😐.
(And therefore, the asteroid Ryugu sample--aside from that one grain that died on the mean streets of London--that was returned by the Hayabusa2 mission is still free of contaminants from the Earth environment.)
Elizabeth Tasker
So what DOES it take to keep a (planet)butt load of microbes OUT of an asteroid sample returned from space 🛰️?
On the other microbe-filled site, JAXA researchers who are working with the asteroid Ryugu sample returned by the Hayabusa2 mission commented on a few of the billion steps taken to keep Ryugu pristine. I am going to report right here...
Elizabeth Tasker
Tsuda Yuichi, Project Manager for #Hayabusa2 and lead for the Extended Mission, Hayabusa2♯, is hinting at the bucket load of scrubbing the spacecraft went through in unmentionable solvents prior to launch in order to demonstrate that it was not only possible to collect a sample, but it could be held separate from the Earth as a veritable time capsule 🛰️.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.