-Motoo Ito

Sometimes, in the back of my mind, laying on a derelict car and staring into the sky over Kaibab, I wonder if one can tell what a brief shooting star is made of? Shouldn't one be able to tell from just the light? Then I think of current and post-missions to C-types, and I know a hard, satisfying answer is coming, if not available somewhere now.  

C-types are like Bennu and Ryugu are supposed to be porous rubble piles. Accumulations, basically dust-bunnies that have been at it for a long time. Early on Ryugu was suspected to be related to two other asteroids, Polana and Eulalia, because they have similar orbital resonance features. Basically they can be wound back to a point where they may have collided or been one object. Therefore Ryugu may be a fragment or debris pile of Eulalia. Eulalia is bigger but otherwise poorly studied, and may have been an early planetesimal. That idea is still sitting on the table with this LPI not seeming to alter it.

This LPI involves a lot a procedure. It's best for someone looking from a technologist perspective. But Hayabusa is primarily a JAXA mission and so it's a great intro to JAXA as well. That's a big deal, ESA and JAXA are taking on better missions with higher science returns. Arguably they have surpassed Roscosmos already and JUICE is one of the most exciting upcoming probes, an ESA mission.    

• At 30:40 the slides get good. A nice sliced sample, with coloration, labeling and a close-up. You get a strong sense of what you can and cant expect to extract from common C-types, fictionally or realistically. 
• All the following slides are about as good, with some fun molecules coming out such as odd halides and globules. 
• He's got some really dry nerd jokes all over the place in here. Math nerds especially may appreciate, which is generally true all over because the best parts of this LPI involve a variety of clever graphs.