The (PMSCF), commonly known as the Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center (ESCuC, 地球外試料キュレーションセンター) is the facility where Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (

JAXA The is the Japanese national air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into o ...

) conducts the curation works of extraterrestrial materials retrieved by some

sample-return mission A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules or a deposit of complex compounds such as lo ...

s. They work closely with Japan's Astromaterials Science Research Group. Its objectives include documentation, preservation, preparation, and distribution of samples. All samples collected are made available for international distribution upon request.

Overview

The conceptual studies for JAXA's curation facility begun in 2005, the specifications were decided in 2007, and the facility was completed in 2008 in time to receive the asteroid samples retrieved by the ''

Hayabusa was a robotic spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis. ''Hayabusa'', formerly known as MUSES-C ...

'' mission. Due to the nature of the Hayabusa returned samples, the facility developed the capability to handle particles as small as 10 μm by using a system based on electrostatic micromanipulation within a clean chamber in contact with either vacuum or an inert gas (usually nitrogen). The facility also features a wide variety of laboratories and analyzers, including XCT/ XRD,

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EPMA An electron microprobe (EMP), also known as an electron probe microanalyzer (EPMA) or electron micro probe analyzer (EMPA), is an analytical tool used to non-destructively determine the chemical composition of small volumes of solid materials. It ...

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, FTIR,

Raman Raman may refer to: People * Raman (name) *C. V. Raman (1888–1970), Indian Nobel Prize-winning physicist Places * Raman, Punjab (India) * Raman, Rawalpindi, Pakistan * Raman District, Yala Province, Thailand ** Raman Railway Station * Ra ...

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, noble-gas- MS, and ToF-

. The "Monitoring and Meeting Room" has recently been retrofitted to host the samples returned by the Hayabusa2 mission from the carbonaceous asteroid Ryugu.

Catalogue

Samples include: *Asteroid

25143 Itokawa 25143 Itokawa (provisional designation ) is a sub-kilometer near-Earth object of the Apollo group and a potentially hazardous asteroid. It was discovered by the LINEAR program in 1998 and later named after Japanese rocket engineer Hideo Itokawa ...

, retrieved by the ''

'' mission. *Meteorites and standard samples *Samples collected by the

Tanpopo was a sub-group of the Japanese idol girl group Morning Musume and associated with Hello! Project. It was formed by Up-Front Promotion in November 1998 as Morning Musume's first sub-group. While the main group Morning Musume features predomi ...

orbital experiment. *Asteroid

162173 Ryugu 162173 Ryugu, provisional designation , is a near-Earth object and a potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group. It measures approximately in diameter and is a dark object of the rare spectral type Cb, with qualities of both a C-type ...

, to be retrieved by ''

Hayabusa2 is an asteroid sample-return mission operated by the Japanese state space agency JAXA. It is a successor to the ''Hayabusa'' mission, which returned asteroid samples for the first time in June 2010. ''Hayabusa2'' was launched on 3 December ...

''. Returned to Earth in December 2020. ;Future samples expected * Asteroid

101955 Bennu 101955 Bennu (provisional designation ) is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on 11 September 1999. It is a potentially hazardous object that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table and has the highest cumu ...

, to be retrieved by the NASA ''

OSIRIS-REx OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) is a NASA asteroid-study and sample-return mission. The mission's primary goal is to obtain a sample of at least from 101955 Bennu, a carbo ...

'' mission. Returned to Earth on September 24, 2023.

Similar facilities

Other facilities dedicated to the curation of pristine returned extraterrestrial samples are the NASA Johnson Space Center Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office, the Russian Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow for Luna samples and the CNSA curatorial facility for Chang'e 5 lunar samples. There are currently no pristine returned samples curatorial facility in Europe, even though preparatory studies have been conducted in the recent past.EURO EURO-CARES Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Facility: Architecture as an enabler of science
(PDF) Aurore Hutzler, Emre Kilic, Allan Bennett, Ludovic Ferrière. 47th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 16-20 July 2017, Charleston, South Carolina. Paper ICES-2017-323. EURO-CARES.
European Curation of Astromaterials Returned from Exploration of Space. Accessed: 25 September 2018.

References

{{JAXA Facilities Meteorite mineralogy and petrology Planetary science 2008 establishments in Japan

Overview

Catalogue

Similar facilities

See also

References