JAXA Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center

The clean laboratories that received the first grains ever returned from asteroids, from Itokawa and Ryugu.

Key facts

Where

Sagamihara, Japan

Kind

Research collection

Visiting

Mainly for researchers; some material lent to museums

Japan's space agency runs its Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center at its Sagamihara campus near Tokyo. It was built to receive the samples from the Hayabusa missions.

Hayabusa brought back tiny grains of the asteroid Itokawa in 2010, the first material ever returned from an asteroid. The grains proved that the most common meteorites, the ordinary chondrites, come from stony asteroids like Itokawa. Hayabusa2 returned about 5.4 grams from the dark asteroid Ryugu in December 2020. The Ryugu grains turned out to be very like the rare CI carbonaceous chondrites, rich in water-bearing clays and organic compounds, but untouched by Earth's air and water.

The samples are kept in clean chambers filled with nitrogen and are shared with research teams around the world.

Highlights

• Itokawa first asteroid grains returned
• Ryugu about 5.4 grams returned

Related pages

Opening times, what is on display and access to research collections change over time, so check with the institution before you visit.