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You could call it the revenge of the asteroid that erased the dinosaurs. Kind of.
Eyes on Earth looks forward to the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 from the moment she crushes the asteroid Ryugu in her face – but for scientific reasons, no revenge. The JAXA finally did it last night by throwing a projectile into the darkness to blow up a crater in the 3000-foot-wide space rock. Why? So, it can be studied further, of course.
When most people on this side of the world went to bed or watched television late at night around 10:00 pm And, the operation of Hayabusa's small hand impactor (SCI) was about to launch a cosmic punch. The mother ship Hayabusa2 deployed a 4.4-pound copper plate supported by heavy explosives. 40 minutes later, the explosives exploded, firing the projectile at 4500 km / h. You can probably imagine what happened next.
Hayabusa2 was right. The mothership needed to hide behind Ryugu so as not to be bombarded by the inevitable rain of debris. So he used his DCAM3 camera to take a picture of the blast. DCAM3 captured a shot of the impact and unleashed spirits all over the Earth.
"After the start of the operation, the camera [that] separated from Hayabusa2, captured an image showing an ejection of Ryugu's surface, implying that the ICS had worked as expected, "said a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) official.
Although Hayabusa2 has already picked up a sample of the asteroid in February, when the mothership has managed a brief hit, it can take another one out of the artificial crater if it remains a pretty big debris. The previous sample will land on Earth in 2020 in a special return capsule. If the probe manages to capture another, it will probably do the same, although the JAXA does not know anything yet.
Even if he fails to send more asteroids to his planet, Hayabusa2 will still keep a robotic eye on Ryugu from a distance and study his newly exposed insides. The sample that reaches the man can tell us more about the birth of the solar system and even about the emergence of life on Earth. Asteroids are thought to have brought water and organic molecules to our nascent planet.
This mission will only add to the data collected by Hayabusa2 up to now. The spacecraft has already landed on the asteroid with two jumping rovers and a landing gear weighing more than 4 kg (22 pounds), and it still has another hopper to send this summer.
By the way, another asteroid is about to be punched soon (if you call soon 2022), this time by NASA. Science fiction movies could not do better.
(via Space.com)
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