Turns out there is a January edition of Meteoritics and Planetary Science, I was wrong (or premature). If it’s all electronic anyway, “months” and “issues” are arbitrary, and “shipping time” is not a factor. So apparently the journal is going straight chronologically, without “post-dating.”
Schönbächler, M. Fehr, M. A. Yokoyama, T. et al. Zirconium isotope composition indicates s-process depletion in samples returned from asteroid Ryugu p. 3 .14279
Genge, M. J. Almeida, N. Van Ginneken, M. et al. Rapid colonization of a space-returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms p. 64 .14288
Hezel, D. C. Lehnert, K. A. Elangovan, P. et al. The MetBase database has been merged into Astromat p. 143 .14293
First things first: getting one’s database in order (‘based’?) is important. Very important. The number of official and reported meteorites is in the tens of thousands; this is far too many for a paper catalog, or even a basic website (ask me how I know). If you do meteorite work, the ability to pull up potentials and prospectives and “what ifs” is enabling.
Next we have deep cosmochemistry on the Hayabusa2 sample of Ryugu. Because the Ryugu material has never been truly cooked by being in a planet (only warming episodes, mild and brief by comparison), the sample preserves the early history of the Solar System. Here, we see the pre-history of the Solar System: material from other stars in the Sun’s birth cluster, or lack thereof, contained within Ryugu. (i. e., if the Sun is the father of our System, what can we tell about the aunts and uncles?)
And now we get to the one people have read… or seem to have ‘read’. Word got out of ‘contamination’- presence of Earth germs and microbes on the Ryugu material- and it spread out of context, out of hand. People’s natural reaction- and newsblabbers’ natural angle- is that the Ryugu material was somehow mishandled- oops! What few people bothered to read- and hey, few newsblabbers bothered to point out- was that the Ryugu material in question was a small allocation allowed to leave curation. The bulk of the returned sample is still sitting in highly-controlled labs, under high-spec gas purge, unspoilt. Genge et al. make that point: the microbial growth they report is no threat to the JAXA asteroid program and its mission goals. If anything, Genge et al.’s work validates JAXA, and NASA. Ryugu and Bennu were targets selected for their relevance to early Earth, and the origin of life. The two sample collections are highly relevant, highly-organo-reactive, and highly deserving of the secure, sterile curation facilities and procedures put in place to receive the samples.
JAXA and NASA were right. The oopsie was not caught by readers (irony! oh the irony!) or newsblabbers (‘gotcha journalism’)- the oopsie IS the blab, the ‘seem to have read’ but didn’t ACTUALLY read.