It sounds like science fiction: Scientists deploy a spacecraft to a speeding asteroid, scoop dirt from the space rock and drop the fragments back on Earth somewhere in the Australian outback — all in pursuit of learning how life was, and could be, formed.
That was the seven-year quest of Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, a spacecraft that collected five grams of material from a near-Earth asteroid named Ryugu, roughly meaning “dragon palace” in Japanese. In a Japanese folk tale, Ryugu refers to a magical underwater palace where a fisherman receives a mysterious box.
