It's gentle excitement, as the REAL excitement will be later this summer. There'll be an English summary by your favourite JAXA science communicator afterwards 🙂
The #JAXA ISAS cleanroom facilities (where no more than 1000 mots of dust per cubic foot are allowed to hang in the air) have been expanded.
Because... we're getting another asteroid!
Part of the sample from asteroid Bennu that was returned by #NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will come to JAXA this summer as part of the agreement between the two teamed space agencies.
New Cosmos post (by me 🤸♀️ ) with a peek at the new facilities:
@elizabethtasker "And if the samples were 1000 year old Yamato-e art works, then the Earth’s environment is a paint spray can" is one heck of a comparison!
@emma I worked hard to come up with that 🤣 I was a bit concerned it undermined spray can art, which can legit be quite good, but I hope the point was made in this case.