A Japanese spacecraft has successfully dropped asteroid samples from space. The samples landed safely in the Australian Outback. The container carrying the asteroid soil samples was dropped from 220,000 kilometers in space by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA, confirmed the container, or capsule, had landed in Australia on Sunday. The unpiloted Hayabusa2 was launched in December 2014. It arrived near the asteroid Ryugu in June 2018. Its mission was to gather soil samples that may provide information about how our solar system formed. The spacecraft touched down twice on Ryugu, which sits more than 300 million kilometers from Earth. The first touchdown took place in February 2019, when Hayabusa2 collected surface dust samples. Then, in July 2019, the spacecraft collected samples from below the surface of Ryugu. It did so by landing in a hole that it blasted open.