Explanation:
The streak across the sky is a capsule returning from an
asteroid.
It returned earlier this month from the near-Earth asteroid
162173 Ryugu
carrying small rocks and dust
from its surface.
The canister was released by its mothership,
Japan's
Hayabusa2, a mission that visited
Ryugu in 2018,
harvested a surface sample in 2019,
and zoomed back past Earth.
The jettisoned
return capsule deployed a parachute and
landed in rural
Australia.
A similar mission, NASA's
OSIRIS-
REx,
recently captured rocks and dust from a similar asteroid,
Bennu, and is scheduled to return its surface sample to Earth in 2023.
Analyses
of compounds from these
asteroids holds promise to give humanity new insights about the early
Solar System and new clues about
how water and
organic matter came to be on
Earth.
Experts Debate:
How will
humanity first discover extraterrestrial life?
