A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) review of data collected from near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu supports the ...

A groundbreaking study recently published in the Planetary Science Journalhas raised the possibility that asteroids Bennu, ...

This time last year, scientists got their hands on some very rare space rocks — specifically, 5.4 grams of material from the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu, which was returned to Earth via the ...

Asteroid 162173 Ryugu (Image credit: ISAS/JAXA, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons) The pitch-dark asteroid bits reflect only about 2% to 3% of the light that hits them, the team found.

Journal Reference: Hitoshi Miura, Eizo Nakamura, Tak Kunihiro. The Asteroid 162173 Ryugu: a Cometary Origin. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022; 925 (2): L15 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac4bd5 ...

These findings suggest that Ryugu was once part of a much larger asteroid that formed out of various materials some two million years after our Solar System (some 4.5 billion years ago).

Ryugu, formally known as 162173 Ryugu, is a 2850-foot (870-meter) wide near-Earth asteroid that lacks a protective atmosphere.

It’s been just over a year since JAXA’s renowned Hayabusa-2 mission arrived at asteroid 162173 Ryugu to study the dynamics of the distant space rock and collect surface samples that would later be ...

Image of Ryugu taken by the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft in 2018. Credit: JAXA/wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 Just over a year ago, material from the Japanese Hayabusa 2 mission to Asteroid (162173) Ryugu arrived ...

In 2020 the space mission Hayabusa2 returned samples and images from the space rock Asteroid 162173 or Ryugu, classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) by NASA 's Center for Near-Earth ...

The successor to this mission, called Hayabusa2, was completed near the end of 2020, bringing back material from Asteroid 162173 “Ryugu,” along with a collection of images and data gathered ...