Grains from space

Some of the rarest, most precious materials on Earth originated very, very far away, and are only available to us now because of the incredible Hayabusa mission of JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Hayabusa spacecraft landed on asteroid 25143 Itokawa in November 2005. Against all the odds, it scraped up about 1 500 tiny grains of surface material and brought them back to Earth. These Hayabusa grains have become the focus of scientific study around the world – and three of them are currently being examined at ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands. Find out more in this video, originally created as part of ESA’s joint, live webcast with ESO for Asteroid Day 2018.