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[Mysterious music]

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[Narrator] Long ago, a fisherman
named Urashima Tarō

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rescued a small turtle from a
group of mischievous children.

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A few days later, a giant turtle
greeted Urashima Tarō,

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and carried him beneath the sea
to Ryūgū Castle.

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There, Princess Otohime thanked
Tarō for rescuing

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the little turtle, and rewarded
him with a mysterious

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box of treasure.

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[Music full]

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[Jazz music]

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[Graham] Today is really
exciting, we’re  picking up a

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bunch of samples from the
asteroid Ryugu, and this is an

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asteroid that was visited by a
spacecraft from Japan.

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This was the Hayabusa2 mission,
and this is the second

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mission of its kind that they’ve
sent out to asteroids.

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It’s very similar to the
OSIRIS-REx mission that

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NASA has to the asteroid Bennu.

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They went and visited this
asteroid and they landed,

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actually, two rovers on the
surface to help them

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figure out where they wanted to
sample, and then brought

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the samples back here to Earth
December of 2020.

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Our partners at the Japanese
Space Agency sent us a

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box full of samples from Ryugu.

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So the first thing we have to do
is make sure

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that everything is okay.

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It would be really terrible to
bring something

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that far away from space and
then have something

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go terribly wrong in shipping
from Japan to the US!

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So we just wanted to check
everything out, make sure

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that the packaging was intact,
that everything that was

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shipped was there, and that
nothing was leaking

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and it was all fine – and then
we put it in the freezer

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for safekeeping.

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So sample return mission is a
really important

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scientific activity.

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Often when we think about space
exploration we’re thinking about

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rovers and flyby missions, and
we forget the true value

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of just bringing things back
into our analytical facilities

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here on Earth, and that’s
something the scientific

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community has been doing really
well for a long time.

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If you think about the Moon
samples and solar particles,

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and now asteroids are just some
of the many samples that we’re

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bringing back to try and
understand the solar system.

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[Music crescendo]