![]() The spacecraft will return to Earth with the samples later this year. As the craft touched down, it fired a tantalum bullet into the surface, bursting dust and rock fragments into a collection horn.Īccording to JAXA, the subsurface samples may contain traces from when the solar system was created 4.6 billion years ago, along with organic materials and water. Three months later, the space agency engineers moved the spacecraft above this crater, and then set it into autonomous mode. To collect interior material, Hayabusa2, in April 2019, had sent a nonexplosive, 2-kilogram copper projectile into Ryugu in order to create a crater. ![]() This feat also involved the first collection of subsurface materials from a solar system body other than the Moon. On July 11, 2019, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed that its Hayabusa2 space probe had touched down on the asteroid Ryugu, located 250 million kilometers from Earth, and successfully collected the first ever sample from inside an asteroid. Representational image of an asteroid (Credits: NASA) Japan’s Hayabusa2 Collects Samples from Asteroid Ryugu Though astronomers have had solid evidence for the existence of massive black holes for many years, this historic moment marked the first time it was imaged. Meanwhile, the black hole itself is 650 crore times the mass of the Sun. This black hole lurks in the centre of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy located 55 lakh light-years from Earth. The dark interior in the image is the black hole itself being shielded by the event horizon, a boundary from within which nothing can escape. The historic image shows a ring of light coming from the gas falling into the black hole. ![]() The EHT imaged the silhouette of the black hole using combined data from 8 different telescopes across the world, with help from around 200 scientists. On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released the first direct image of a black hole and its neighbourhood. (Credits: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.) Meanwhile, according to NASA, it will take at least eight more months from now for all the data and images collected by New Horizons to reach Mission Control.Įvent Horizon Telescope Releases First-Ever Image of a Black Hole It orbits the Sun a 160 crore kilometres beyond Pluto, and has been locked in a state of deep-freeze preservation since the universe began 450 crore years ago. The larger, bottom lobe has been named Ultima, and the top lobe, Thule. The images revealed that the object looks like a snowman-it has two lobes, which are essentially two completely different objects joined together. The probe came within 3,540 km of the tiny celestial body on January 1, 2019, nearly 13 years after it launched from Earth in January 2006.Ī day later, NASA released the first clear images of the Kuiper Belt object which was located at a distance of more than 643 crore km from Earth. ![]() NASA welcomed 2019 with the jubilant news of its New Horizons spacecraft completing a successful flyby of the most distant object ever explored in space: Ultima Thule.
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