How Hayabusa2 collected the sample

7:50>> Hopefully I'm pronouncing that right. What it does is it gets near this asteroid. It deploys a kind of remote bomb that >> pulverizes part of that asteroid and then it goes back to that site, >> goes down and then picks up the fragments of the pulverized rock. This is the alternative uh plot to Armageddon. Instead of going on to it and drilling, they did it from an at from the atmosphere. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and they did it remotely. Now we now we can do that, right? Um so >> that that's the the premise of the whole thing. The next video actually shows this is a video from the Jaxa probe and it's showing you you're lower down into

8:32the part of the asteroid that's been pulverized and you grab it. You grab that part and you come out. It's pretty cool that we can successfully like chase this spinning top asteroid, blast a crater, and then bring bring back pristine dirt from an asteroid back home. Who was the one who was like, "Guys, I have an idea. Let's take a bomb." >> Yeah. >> Let's explode it just above the surface so that we can then go down and >> Yeah. And then there's a bunch of dirt instead of rocks, >> right? Because the the idea is the surface is solid. It's a little bit You can't >> Yeah. And the rocks are kind of big. >> Big. And you don't want to have to have a drilling mechanism on the whatever probe you have. >> It's clever. I'm I'm very curious how

9:13that conversation went in the the the proposal meeting. >> Yeah. And the other thing I'm actually curious about is um if the if that little bomb changed the orbit of Ryu, right? Cuz we've we've talked about how planetary defense, one of the biggest things that we can do is just like >> put a minor explosion to change the momentum of that asteroid so that it changes the trajectory around the sun. I'm sure they're actually doing follow-up experiments to see if they can detect that tiny shift in momentum, which is extremely difficult. We've covered this in the past. So um Jaxa and the Hayabusa team they came out with a paper in nature in nature astro a complete set of canonical nucleiobases

9:56in the carbonatous asteroid which means they have found a gct and they found you which is the alphabet of life in some sense right >> it's all the ingredients we need to ratatouille ourself into the way of life >> yes exactly and if we go inside the lab you actually have a photo of the sample that they've got back from the asteroid. So there you can see the dirt from the asteroid. What they did was take that sample, run it through mass spectrometry, chemical analysis, and they could actually identify individual nucleotides, the same ones that make up our DNA in that dirt, which is I think pretty crazy. This is a it's a big it's

10:36a big deal for a number of reasons. Not only the execution of it, but to your point earlier, we've removed the contamination hypothesis from the list of options. >> Yeah, we've removed the contamination hypothesis and it's the same nucleotide basis that we have, >> which is kind of like like it's kind of weird that like aliens would also have the same [laughter]