Japan blew a hole in an asteroid. Now it's going to try and land there

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And if we could look back in the past 4.5 billion years until the dawn of the solar system? If all goes as planned, the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 will attempt precisely this week and offer an unprecedented overview of not only the origin of the solar system, but also the origin of life on Earth.

On Thursday, July 11, the Japanese Space Agency's (JAXA) space shuttle Hayabusa2 will attempt to recover immaculate materials inside the Ryugu asteroid, after drilling a hole in its surface earlier. this year. The bold attempt at landing will take place 290 million kilometers from the Earth. Scientists from all over the world will look forward to a unique mission with exciting implications.

"This is a first for history," says Harold Connolly, co-researcher for Hayabusa2 and NASA. Mission OSIRIS-REx, a comparable asteroid sampling mission taking place elsewhere in the solar system (the two teams will exchange some samples when they return to Earth). "The bottom material may never have been exposed to the surface, and will have preserved the history [of the asteroid] 4.567 billion years ago. "

This will be the second landing of Hayabusa2 on Ryugu, another first in our history of spaceflight – no spacecraft has ever intentionally landed on the surface of another world. His first landing It was produced in February 2019, while it was thought that the probe had managed to take a sample of the asteroid by shooting a bullet into the surface along an arm of the body. 39 long sampling of one meter to project a material into a collector.

The spacecraft revolves around Ryugu, a carbon-rich asteroid measuring about one kilometer in diameter, since June 2018 (in free fall). multiple landing gear later that year) having left the Earth in December 2014. It is the successor of the troubled but finally successful Hayabusa1 mission, which returned samples of another asteroid – Itokawa – in 2010. This time around Japan, several samples of a much larger size are searched.

Hayabusa1 encountered problems with its sampling mechanism and only came back with a few tiny grains from a single site located in Itokawa. Hayabusa2, meanwhile, targets 0.1 g of material from two separate sites.

However, there is no way to know for sure whether it succeeded until the satellite returned to Earth by the end of 2020 because its collector has no mechanism to detect a sample. So far, the team can only rely on the images taken during the maneuvers, which seem to indicate that enough material has been raised to reach the collector at least at the first landing.

During this second touchdown, the landing process will be substantially the same. Hayabusa2 will begin its descent to Ryugu on Wednesday, July 10th at 11am. local time in Japan (10:00 am Eastern Time, Tuesday, July 9th). It is expected to reach the surface of the asteroid exactly 24 hours later, on July 11, to land at 11 o'clock. local time in Japan (and the action will be broadcast live on the JAXA network). Youtube channel).

The probe will approach the asteroid at a final speed of a few centimeters per second. He will then briefly contact the surface, shooting his projectile into the ground, before climbing quickly and taking about half a day to return to his original position 20 kilometers above the asteroid. "The difficulty of the second touchdown is almost the same as that of the first," says Makoto Yoshikawa, Mission Manager for Hayabusa2. "The sample collection is the same."

Of course, the major difference this time lies in the very nature of the sample. The first sample of Hayabusa2 was taken directly from the surface. Although scientifically interesting, it is likely that this sample has been irradiated by the solar wind and cosmic rays throughout the history of the asteroid, thus changing its characteristics. Thus, during the design of the mission, the JAXA decided to also try to collect materials under the surface.

On April 4, the space shuttle launched an impactor called "Small Carand-On Impactor" (SCI), a 2.5-kilogram projectile fired at the asteroid to form a crater. The images published after the event showed that the impactor had managed to form a small deformation on the surface, measuring about 20 meters wide. In doing so, materials hidden underground were also projected to the surface.

JAXA then took some time to decide whether to attempt a landing at this location. They had already abandoned the idea of ​​a third landing on the asteroid, fearing an increased risk of too many landings. But at the end of June 2019, they decide to continue the bold mission in this artificial crater.

The landing site, known as C01-C, is about 20 meters above the center of the impact, where material is believed to have been spilled on the surface. The landing area is approximately 3.5 meters wide and is only slightly larger than the area designated for the first landing at three meters.

The team will now prepare to slowly lower the spacecraft in the coming days. If, for whatever reason, they have to give up, a second landing attempt will take place in the week of July 22nd. After that, the asteroid will be too close to the Sun and therefore too active for an attempt to land. Hurry up.

"After July, it will no longer be possible to perform the touchdown," says Stefania Soldini, JAXA research associate in the Hayabusa2 project team. "Therefore, any delay in the planned ongoing operation may not have any other chances of collecting underground samples."

There are some notable concerns regarding the landing. During the first landing, the unstable dust of the asteroid caused a "fog" slightly covering the optical sensors of the spacecraft. These are crucial for low-altitude operations near the asteroid. As a result, the team will descend on the asteroid slightly faster than before.

Another factor is that the surface inside the crater of impact is not smooth, with a maximum depth of two meters. "This is dangerous for the spacecraft to land inside the crater," notes Yoshikawa. However, he added, it was not thought that there could be a material that could damage the spacecraft, but other dangers remain. "This operation always involves high risks," adds Soldini.

If JAXA can successfully complete this landing, it is difficult to overestimate its scientific importance. In December 2019, the spacecraft will leave the asteroid to return to Earth by the end of 2020. It will deploy a capsule containing both samples in the Earth's atmosphere for a ground-based collection. This will give us material not only in two places on the asteroid, which is in itself unprecedented, but virgin material from an asteroid also for the first time in its history.

"[The landing on Ryugu] It will be a very interesting, scary and important moment for this fascinating mission, "said Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, co-investigator of the mission. "This is worth the risk as long as all steps are taken to abort if anything suspicious occurs during the operation!"

In particular, it should be noted how the surface material has been affected by the above-mentioned processes of alteration of the atmosphere with respect to the subsoil sample. "We want to understand the functioning of spatial disintegration for this type of body still poorly understood," says Michel.

The surface of the asteroid also seems to be quite dehydrated, it contains little water, but it is possible that the asteroid is richer in water below its surface. Scientists will want to know if the entire asteroid is relatively dry or if its surface has simply been burned by the heat of the Sun throughout its history.

This could have implications for other things as well, such as the presence of organic matter (the building blocks of life) on asteroids. The JAXA team believes that these Ryugu samples could provide information on organic matter and water even before the formation of the Earth. Perhaps asteroids have even played a role in delivering such materials to Earth.

"We think it's hard to know" life "with Ryugu's material, but we hope to be able to get information on the original material that would become life," Yoshikawa said. "With regard to water, we think we can get information on the origin of the water of the Earth."

There are already significant differences between the two landing sites. The material exposed by the crater is much darker than the surface material of the first landing site, for reasons that are not clear. Only when these samples are sent back to Earth can we find out and answer some of our other burning questions.

All eyes are now on the spacecraft before the proposed descent to the surface. Japan may have already landed on an asteroid, but the stakes are higher than ever. There are only a few weeks left for the team to make landing impossible, and problems remain with landing operations themselves. But if all goes well, we will soon be able to get the material of the dawn of the solar system for the first time in history. "It's pretty nerve-racking," says Connolly.

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And if we could look back in the past 4.5 billion years until the dawn of the solar system? If all goes as planned, the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 will attempt precisely this week and offer an unprecedented overview of not only the origin of the solar system, but also the origin of life on Earth.

On Thursday, July 11, the Japanese Space Agency's (JAXA) space shuttle Hayabusa2 will attempt to recover immaculate materials inside the Ryugu asteroid, after drilling a hole in its surface earlier. this year. The bold attempt at landing will take place 290 million kilometers from the Earth. Scientists from all over the world will look forward to an unparalleled mission with tantalizing implications.

"This is a first for history," says Harold Connolly, co-researcher at Hayabusa2 and NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, a similar mission of sampling asteroids elsewhere in the Solar System (both teams will be returning samples back to Earth). "The bottom material may never have been exposed to the surface, and will have preserved the history [of the asteroid] 4.567 billion years ago. "

This will be the second landing of Hayabusa2 on Ryugu, another first in our history of spaceflight – no spacecraft has ever intentionally landed on the surface of another world. Its first landing took place in February 2019, when it was assumed that the probe had managed to take a sample of the asteroid by firing a bullet into the surface along a one-meter long sampling arm. to project material into a collector.

The spacecraft revolves around Ryugu, a carbon-rich asteroid measuring about one kilometer, since June 2018 (several landing gear later in the year) having been launched from the Earth in December 2014. It is the successor of the mission difficult but ultimately successful of Hayabusa1, which returned samples of another asteroid – Itokawa – in 2010. This time in Japan, we target several samples of a much larger size.

Hayabusa1 encountered problems with its sampling mechanism and only came back with a few tiny grains from a single site located in Itokawa. Hayabusa2, meanwhile, targets 0.1 g of material from two separate sites.

However, there is no way to know with certainty whether it succeeded until the spacecraft returned to Earth at the end of 2020, its collector having no mechanism to detect a sample. So far, the team can only rely on the images taken during the maneuvers, which seem to indicate that enough material has been raised to reach the collector at least at the first landing.

During this second touchdown, the landing process will be substantially the same. Hayabusa2 will begin its descent to Ryugu on Wednesday, July 10th at 11am. local time in Japan (10:00 am Eastern Time, Tuesday, July 9th). It is expected to reach the surface of the asteroid exactly 24 hours later, on July 11, to land at 11 o'clock. local time in Japan (and the action will be broadcast live on the JAXA YouTube channel).

The probe will approach the asteroid at a final speed of a few centimeters per second. He will then briefly contact the surface, shooting his projectile into the ground, before climbing quickly and taking about half a day to return to his original position 20 kilometers above the asteroid. "The difficulty of the second touchdown is almost the same as that of the first," says Makoto Yoshikawa, Mission Manager for Hayabusa2. "The sample collection is the same."

Of course, the major difference this time lies in the very nature of the sample. The first sample of Hayabusa2 was taken directly from the surface. Although scientifically interesting, it is likely that this sample has been irradiated by the solar wind and cosmic rays throughout the history of the asteroid, thus changing its characteristics. Thus, during the design of the mission, the JAXA decided to also try to collect materials under the surface.

On April 4, the space shuttle launched an impactor called "Small Carand-On Impactor" (SCI), a 2.5-kilogram projectile fired at the asteroid to form a crater. The images published after the event showed that the impactor had managed to form a small deformation on the surface, measuring about 20 meters wide. In doing so, materials hidden underground were also projected to the surface.

JAXA then took some time to decide whether to attempt a landing at this location. They had already abandoned the idea of ​​a third landing on the asteroid, fearing an increased risk of too many landings. But at the end of June 2019, they decide to continue the bold mission in this artificial crater.

The landing site, known as the C01-C, is located about 20 meters above the center of the impact, where it is believed that the material was spilled at the area. The landing area is approximately 3.5 meters wide and is only slightly larger than the area designated for the first landing at three meters.

The team will now prepare to slowly lower the spacecraft in the coming days. If, for whatever reason, they have to give up, a second landing attempt will take place in the week of July 22nd. After that, the asteroid will be too close to the Sun and therefore too active for an attempt to land. Hurry up.

"After July, it will no longer be possible to perform the touchdown," says Stefania Soldini, JAXA research associate in the Hayabusa2 project team. "Therefore, any delay in the planned ongoing operation may not have any other chances of collecting underground samples."

There are some notable concerns regarding the landing. During the first landing, the unstable dust of the asteroid caused a "fog" slightly covering the optical sensors of the spacecraft. These are crucial for low-altitude operations near the asteroid. As a result, the team will descend on the asteroid slightly faster than before.

Another factor is that the surface inside the crater of impact is not smooth, with a maximum depth of two meters. "This is dangerous for the spacecraft to land inside the crater," notes Yoshikawa. However, he added, it was not thought that there could be a material that could damage the spacecraft, but other dangers remain. "This operation always involves high risks," adds Soldini.

If JAXA can successfully complete this landing, it is difficult to overestimate its scientific importance. In December 2019, the spacecraft will leave the asteroid to return to Earth by the end of 2020. It will deploy a capsule containing both samples in the Earth's atmosphere for a ground-based collection. This will give us material not only in two places on the asteroid, which is in itself unprecedented, but also virgin material from an asteroid for the first time in its history.

"[The landing on Ryugu] It will be a very interesting, frightening and important moment for this fascinating mission, "says Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, co-investigator of the mission. "This is worth the risk as long as all steps are taken to abort if anything suspicious occurs during the operation!"

In particular, it should be noted how the surface material has been affected by the above-mentioned processes of alteration of the atmosphere with respect to the subsoil sample. "We want to understand the functioning of spatial disintegration for this type of body still poorly understood," says Michel.

The surface of the asteroid also seems to be quite dehydrated, it contains little water, but it is possible that the asteroid is richer in water below its surface. Scientists will want to know if the entire asteroid is relatively dry or if its surface has simply been burned by the heat of the Sun throughout its history.

This could have implications for other things as well, such as the presence of organic matter (the building blocks of life) on asteroids. The JAXA team believes that these Ryugu samples could provide information on organic matter and water even before the formation of the Earth. Perhaps asteroids have even played a role in delivering such materials to Earth.

"We think it's hard to know" life "with Ryugu's material, but we hope to be able to get information on the original material that would become life," Yoshikawa said. "With regard to water, we think we can get information on the origin of the water of the Earth."

There are already significant differences between the two landing sites. The material exposed by the crater is much darker than the surface material of the first landing site, for reasons that are not clear. Only when these samples are sent back to Earth can we find out and answer some of our other burning questions.

All eyes are now on the spacecraft before the proposed descent to the surface. Japan may have already landed on an asteroid, but the stakes are higher than ever. There are only a few weeks left for the team to make landing impossible, and problems remain with landing operations themselves. But if all goes well, we will soon be able to get the material of the dawn of the solar system for the first time in history. "It's pretty nerve-racking," says Connolly.