Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft will try to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu during the week of 18 February, mission officials said during a press briefing last week. Should problems arise, a backup week is available starting 4 March. The team is now considering two sample collection sites, the smaller of which is just a few meters across.

Hayabusa2 spent the end of 2018 looping a safe distance from asteroid Ryugu and back again during solar conjunction, returning to its home position 20 kilometers away on 29 December.

JAXA's website has some interesting details about how the team tried to communicate with—or at least, get some very basic information from—Hayabusa2 during solar conjunction. Computer data is binary, a stream of zeros and ones. Spacecraft transmit the zeros and ones by varying the intensity of the spacecraft's radio signal. Unfortunately, when a spacecraft is next to the Sun in the sky, plasma near the Sun's surface interferes with the signal, making the intensity fluctuate so badly some zeros look like ones and some ones look like zeros. To compensate for this, Hayabusa2 sent the same information multiple times. Engineers gave computer algorithms on Earth several copies of the same message, using them to sort out which parts of the signal were supposed to be zeros and which parts were supposed to be ones.

Now that Ryugu and the Sun aren't so close to each other in the sky, Hayabusa2 is back to normal operations, and that means preparing for touchdown and sample collection! The first touchdown is planned for the week of 18 February, with a backup the week of 4 March.

As a reminder, Ryugu is surprisingly rocky, and there are very few places to safely bring the spacecraft down to collect a sample. The team is still considering a circular, 20-meter-wide site called L08-B—more specifically, an irregular region within that called L08-B1—but they are also eyeballing another spot a few meters away called L08-E1.