Researchers studied tiny asteroid fragments from Ryugu, revealing that it originated in the outer solar system and evolved ...

Last year, researchers excitedly announced that they had found two organic compounds essential for living organisms in ...

Scientists have found microorganisms crawling over a sample retrieved from the 200 million-mile-distant asteroid Ryugu. But ...

Samples taken from the space-returned piece of asteroid Ryugu were collected and prepared under strict anti-contamination ...

A sample of the asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by the Hayabusa2 mission was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms ...

A chunk of rock collected from the asteroid Ryugu contains bacteria—but, unfortunately, it's not evidence of alien life.

Panspermia is the hypothesis that life can survive the transfer between planetary bodies as a secondary path for life to get ...

Ryugu, formally known as 162173 Ryugu, is a 2850-foot (870-meter) wide near-Earth asteroid that lacks a protective atmosphere. This means its surface is directly exposed to space and can gather ...

In June 2018, Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission reached asteroid 162173 Ryugu. It studied the asteroid for about 15 months, deploying small rovers and a lander, before gathering a sample and returning it ...

Microscope image of one of the small fragments of asteroid 162173 Ryugu studied by scientists at the Advanced Photon Source. This fragment is roughly 400 microns in diameter, or about the width of ...

Snapping a series of pictures that revealed the asteroid’s shape. The asteroid of choice was 162173 Ryugu, or Ryugu for short. In Japanese it refers to a magical, underwater Dragon Palace.