Asteroid Ryugu

Why in News?

•  Ryugu that was recently carried to Earth in 2020 by the Japanese space agency’s asteroid sample-return mission, Hayabusa 2 may hold the answers to the origin of the Earth.

Highlights

• Asteroid Ryugu is a diamond-shaped space rock. The asteroid’s name means “dragon palace” in Japanese and refers to a magical underwater castle in a Japanese folktale.
• Ryugu was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, a collaborative, U.S.-based project to catalogue and track space rocks.
• The asteroid is about 2,952 feet (900 meters) in diameter.
• Ryugu is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars and occasionally crosses Earth’s orbit, which means the space rock is classified as “potentially hazardous,” though the body poses no imminent danger to our world
• Roughly 5 % of materials that assembled to form Earth more than 4.5 billion years ago could have come from space rocks similar to near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.
• These asteroid samples represent the first solids to be formed in the solar system. This means they could be the building blocks of Earth.
• Ryugu has copper and zinc isotope ratios similar to a very rare group of meteorites that are likely the most primitive (ones with the closest composition to the Sun).
• They are primitive because they likely formed in the outer solar system, where volatile elements are preserved.
• In contrast, materials created closer to the Sun may have lost a part of their volatile inventory due to evaporation.
• These samples could help evaluate the role of Ryugu-like objects in depositing volatile elements to terrestrial planets.
• Volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are thought to have played a key role in forging complex organic molecules — ingredients essential to build habitable worlds like Earth.
• It can also help to evaluate whether Ryugu-type materials also contributed to the origin of Mars.