Scientists from the Southwest Research Institute have found strong evidence that near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu share a common origin with Polana, a much larger asteroid in the main belt. By ...

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, ...

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

The nearly-kilometer-long 162173 Ryugu asteroid had a sample brought back by JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission, and the findings can reveal new insights on the birth of the solar system.

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Soon, they will be able to open it to see how much material from Ryugu they managed to return to Earth. This coloured view of asteroid 162173 Ryugu was captured by the ONC-T camera on board Hayabusa2.

At its closest orbit, asteroid 162173 Ryugu is only about 60,000 miles from Earth. That’s only a quarter of the distance to the moon.

Experts say asteroid 162173 Ryugu has a remarkably high organic matter content It is a rubble-pile asteroid made up of pieces of rock clumped together by gravity ...