If you wanted to slice stuff up in space, what would you bring with you? 'Samurai' swords, which have been made in Japan for centuries, might be on your list because the tempered steel used in them is notoriously tough. There are plenty of videos online showing these Japanese swords, also called 'katana', cutting up everything from thick boards of wood to metal pipes.

Now, a trio of engineers have teamed up with a master Japanese swordsmith to design a rock-sampling device made with the same steel used in these blades – and the plan is to use it on an asteroid.

Japan’s Hayabusa missions have so far sent spacecraft, rovers and sampling tools to a one kilometre-wide asteroid called Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars. Hayabusa2’s rovers recently sent back stunning images of the asteroid’s black, rocky surface. But bringing fragments of Ryugu back to Earth is an enormously tricky task, which is why novel ideas are being suggested for how to do it.

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In a paper detailing early experiments, the team – including Genrokuro Matsunaga, a 70-year-old swordsmith and Takeo Watanabe at Kanagawa Institute of Technology – explain how they have made several rock corers with various metallic compositions. Four contain tamahagane, the traditional metal made from iron sand and charcoal that is used in Japanese swords. “To achieve the sharpness and plasticity demand of the corer tip, we borrowed the techniques of traditional Japanese sword-smithing in fabricating the corer samples,” the authors write. (You can view stunning images of this process in our gallery: The amazing craft of samurai swords.)