No words can ever fully describe it." And he went on to speculate that "Ryugu-jo" (Dragon Palace Castle) in the popular folktale of Urashima Taro may have been modeled on Shuri-jo of Ryukyu.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their study of a small sample of material ...

Japan has landed two hopping robots onto asteroid Ryugu as part of the Hayabusa2 mission. It's Japan's second mission to an asteroid, where it plans to return some samples of Ryugu to Earth by the ...

Thanks to asteroid Ryugu, now we know. The asteroid is a peculiar one – maybe even an extinct comet. It was visited by the Japanese mission Hayabusa-2, which collected samples from the surface ...

The spacecraft left its orbit around Ryugu on Wednesday with samples of the asteroid in tow. Hayabusa-2 is expected to return to Earth in late 2020, completing its successful multi-year mission.

The return of these extraterrestrial samples to Earth in 2020 opened the door to new hypotheses. These grains taken from Ryugu, an asteroid located beyond Jupiter, contain crucial elements for the ...

The two small "rovers", which were despatched from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Friday, will move around the 1km-wide space rock known as Ryugu. The asteroid's low gravity means they can hop ...

Researchers have found more than 20 different amino acids, the building blocks of life, in soil samples Japan’s Hayabusa 2 space probe brought back from the asteroid Ryugu, according to sources.