A Hayabusa2 spacecraft blows an artificial crater into the surface of the Ryugu asteroid

The Japanese satellite Hayabusa2 has just completed another intense mission: he used an explosive to blow up a crater on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. This success comes after the probe landed briefly on the asteroid in February, firing a tantalum ball into the surface in the hope of bringing down debris.

Thursday, Hayabusa2 of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has deployed its small cabin impactor (SCI) operation to create an artificial crater that the probe will then be able to study. The JAXA team hopes this will allow them to observe how craters typically form on the asteroid. It was a complex multi-step experiment and a process that resulted in a critical window of about 40 minutes.

After deploying the ICS and before the detonation, Hayabusa2 had to reposition itself at a safe distance, out of the path of potential debris. According to the Planetary Society, it was essentially a side scooter before tipping down, so it was a little behind Ryugu.

During the evacuation process, the probe pulled out its deployable camera 3 (DCAM3), which captured the action about a kilometer away. As you can see in the image tweeted above, the SCI has indeed raised debris after colliding with Ryugu. The DCAM3 is equipped with two cameras, a high-resolution digital camera and a low-resolution analog camera that should return images in real time.

In addition to studying the consequences of the artificial crater created by the impactor, Hayabusa2 might also be able to take a sample below the surface.

Before Thursday 's explosion attempt, scientists had a fairly rough estimate of the size of a crater that the explosive could produce. According to some models, the width of the crater was about 10 meters, but the target of the error of the impact was 200 meters, which represented different types of surface, according to Planetary Society. We are still waiting for JAXA updates to learn more about the nature of the newly created crater.

Hayabusa2 has an appointment with Ryugu in June 2018 after a four-year trip. During the past year, Ryugu has performed all kinds of experiments. In addition to the deployment of MINERVA-II rovers and the MASCOT lander, the spacecraft made in February one of its biggest targets brought back to Earth.

We will not know for sure if the probe was able to recover samples until it returned to Earth at the end of 2020.

Hayabusa2 is not the only spacecraft to study an asteroid close to the Earth. NASA's OSIRIS-REx space probe is currently visiting the asteroid Bennu. If all goes as planned, the NASA probe will collect its own samples and bring them back to Earth in 2023.

[JAXA, Planetary Society]