Japan's Hayabusa 2 Mission Successfully Lands On The Surface Of Asteroid
Hayabusa 2 is, as you might guess, a sequel to the original Hayabusa, which like this one was an asteroid sampling mission. Japan's Hayabusa 2 Mission Hayabusa2 carries multiple payloads for science: remote sensing, sampling, and four small rovers that will investigate the asteroid surface to gather an environmental context for the samples to be returned. Ryugu is of a particularly primitive asteroid variety, and studying it could shed light on the origin and evolution of Earth. Initially, launch was planned for 30 November 2014 (13:23 local time), but was delayed to 3 December 2014 04:22 UTC (4 December 2014 13:22:04 local time). [ads-post] Hayabusa2 arrived at the sasaran asteroid 162173 Ryugu (formerly designated 1999 JU3) on 27 June 2018. It is expected to survey the asteroid, which is a near-Earth asteroid, for a year and a half during which time it will collect samples multiple times, depart in December 2019, and return the samples to Earth in December 2020. ...