An asteroid could unlock the Solar System’s secrets
Science is a shared record. It is built by many countries over many decades and it does not particularly care who contributed which page. It cares only whether the page is new. The harder question is where the missing pages are kept. For the opening chapter of the Solar System, the answer is inconvenient: mostly somewhere we cannot go Most of what we want to know about the first few million years…
The Solar System's early history holds crucial clues about the origins of water and organic material. These vital components are preserved in icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt, but they are located far from Earth, making direct observation a long-term endeavor. One asteroid, Justitia, is potentially a page from this distant archive that has migrated closer to the Sun.
This 8-year-old asteroid sits in the Kuiper Belt, differing in color and composition from other objects there. It's likely that Justitia formed in the outer Solar System before migrating inward, and its surface may contain a mixture of ice and complex organic material. The MBR Explorer spacecraft, to be launched from Japan in March 2028, will attempt to reach Justitia by traveling five billion kilometers over eight years, employing gravity assists from Venus, Earth, and Mars.
The spacecraft is equipped with a probe that will independently analyze the asteroid's surface, providing the closest observations of this unique body. If successful, the findings from Justitia could unlock the Solar System's secrets by revealing the presence of material from the outer Solar System and shedding light on the early stages of planetary formation.
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