Ryugu was born an asteroid, became a comet, and died an asteroid

A small capsule from the Hayabusa2 mission fell to Earth in December 2020. It contained just a small amount of the most precious stuff there is: samples from the surface and interior of an asteroid.

The results of some of the samples analyzed show that the asteroid is the same as it was when the solar system was brand new.

It's perfect for study by a space mission because of its close proximity to Earth. It's small, less than 900 meters wide, and it's called a C-type asteroid because it only reflects a small part of the light that hits it. They are hard to study from the ground because they are faint.

Hayabusa2 was there in the year 2018? Four rovers were dropped to look at it up close. It dropped down to collect samples. Materials were taken from the surface. The second used a cannon that was essentially a free-flying cannon to shoot a 2 kiloogram copper slug into the asteroid. The samples came from deeper inside the building.

They were put into different containers and sent to Earth. A paper just published by scientists shows how much asteroidal material was found in 2020.

C1 chondrites are a type of meteorite. Since they formed billions of years ago, these are dark, rich in carbon, and have very little processing. They're called primitive by scientists.

These meteorites are different in a number of ways. When the solar system was young, chondrules grow, which is why C1s have them. It's even more primitive because it doesn't have even those. It is the most complete material ever studied.

It contains minerals that form in water. It's liquid water. Scientists were able to show that the peak of liquid water content was only about 5 million years after the solar system formed. The material from the second collection site shows that the water was about 37 C and never got higher than 100.

Small asteroids were once part of larger asteroids that were destroyed by impacts. The composition shows that it formed far from the Sun, but it was warm. The parent body must have been large enough to have enough radioactive elements to melt the water ice on it.

A small part of an ice-bearing asteroid may have been the start of the life story of Ryugu. Over time, Ryugu had many such impacts, or at least one big enough to destroy it and leave a hole in the ground. When it got close to the Sun, water-bearing minerals lost their water through the process of sublimation, which dried it out and made it very porous. It can be thought of as starting off as an asteroid, becoming a comet, and then reverting back to an asteroid again. It is possible that this is the life cycle of many asteroids.

There was a big finding and it was exciting.

The basic building blocks of life are made with the help of the Amino Acids. We don't know where they came from. We can find them in meteorites and comets. It's possible that meteorites were contaminated after falling to Earth, though some are collected so quickly it's unlikely, but the result shows for sure that amino acids are present on asteroids. It is possible that they brought the first ones to Earth.

Life here began out there for a bit of a broad interpretation.

This is the first study that will be done with these samples. The samples from the asteroid Bennu will be dropped to Earth in September. This will be a bonanza for planetary science, and for investigating what the solar system was like right after it formed, because hundreds of grams of material were grabbed.