Japanese space probe’s gifts: Asteroid chips like charcoal – Japan Today

They resemble small fragments of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese space probe were hardly disappointing.
The samples Japanese space officials described Thursday are as big as one centimeter and rock hard, not breaking when picked up or poured into another container. Smaller black, sandy granules the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week.
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft got the two sets of samples last year from…

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