Share Facebook

Twitter

The Japanese space probe Hayabusa 2 has arrived at the asteroid Ryugu after a 42-month journey and is ready to begin 18 months of exploration. This mission is a follow-up of the Hayabusa mission, which successfully returned an asteroid sample in June 2010.

The mission includes landing three small rovers from Japan and one small lander provided by a partnership between Germany and France on the asteroid’s surface and blasting out some material so that the probe can scoop up a sample from beneath the surface to return to Earth for analysis.

Unlike the famous Mars Rovers, the rovers that will land on Ryugu’s surface are about the size of drops of water and will travel across the asteroid by “hopping” instead of rolling on wheels. While the rovers are incapable of taking pictures, the probe can compensate by taking pictures from its position 20 kilometers from Ryugo with the Thermal Infrared Imager, assisted by the Near InfraRed Spectrometer, which is capable of picking up infrared radiation with a frequency of 3μm. Data from the lander, rovers, and probe may return information on organics and water that may have existed in the early solar system.

The roughly cube-shaped asteroid, which gets its informal name from a dragon’s palace in a Japanese fairy tale, is listed as a C-class near-Earth asteroid that has a more primodial form than other classes of asteroids. It is unlikely to strike Earth within the next few centuries. At only one kilometer wide, Ryugu is also unlikely to cause a mass extinction event if it does strike Earth.

Confirmation of Hayabusa 2’s rendezvous occurred at 9:35 AM Japan Standard Time on June 27. Scientists anticipate that a successful sample return mission and the return of data from instruments on the probe and its rovers will help them refine theories about the early solar system and the possible origins of life in the solar system.