The culmination of a journey that began three and a half years ago, Japan’s Hayabusa2 space probe has finally reached its destination: the asteroid Ryugu, orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 300 million kilometers from Earth.
Meanwhile, the French-German Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT), launched from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, landed safely on Ryugu and was involved with its team, the lander’s official Twitter account said.
And then I discovered myself in a spot unlike another on Earth. A land filled with wonders, secrets and dangers! I landed on the asteroid Ryugu! #AsteroidLanding https://t.co/EDwh99aImv
— MASCOT lander (@MASCOT2018) October 3, 2018
“And then I discovered myself in a spot like no other on Earth. In a land filled with wonders, secrets and dangers! – wrote the @MASCOT2018 account on Twitter.
“I landed on the asteroid Ryugu!”
MASCOT is predicted to gather a wide selection of knowledge on the asteroid and produce it home for evaluation.
“Collecting data from the surface of the asteroid is amazingly necessary, we now have high expectations for scientific data,” Hayabusa2 mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said at a pre-landing briefing, as reported by the portal Jakarta Post Office.
Ryugu is about 900 meters in diameter and rotates around its axis once every 7.5 hours like a spinning top. The asteroid is roofed with crater-like depressions and strewn with boulders.
Scientists expected Ryugu to be about this size, but they never imagined it will be diamond-shaped. “When we first saw this shape, we realized how difficult it would be [to land on the asteroid],” explained mission project manager Yuichi Tsuda at a press conference hosted by JAXA.
Hayabusa2, in regards to the size of a big refrigerator and equipped with solar panels, is the successor to JAXA’s first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa, which implies falcon in Japanese.
The Hayabusa2 mission, which costs about 30 billion yen ($260 million), was launched in December 2014 and can return to Earth with its samples in 2020.
