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By Denise Chow
A Japanese spacecraft is scheduled to land on a distant asteroid on Thursday before firing into space rock to capture some debris that will eventually be sent back to Earth.
Launched in 2014 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Hayabusa 2 probe reached the Ryugu asteroid in June 2018, after a journey of 2 billion kilometers. In the months that followed, the refrigerator-sized craft dropped a pair of small rovers on space rock and is getting closer and closer to its surface. If everything goes as planned, it will launch its thrusters and will settle on the asteroid Thursday around 18 hours. EST (approximately 22:00 local time from Japan on February 22).
The landing was planned for last October, but the JAXA postponed it after the instruments aboard the rovers revealed that the surface of the asteroid was not covered with dusty soil (regolith ) but it was strewn with rocks – something scientists did not anticipate.
"The expected topography of a powdery fine regolith has not been found on the surface of Ryugu," members of the Hayabusa 2 team said in a February 14 blog post on JAXA website. "It took time to investigate the safety of the spacecraft during TD," they said, using an abbreviation of "touchdown".
If Hayabusa 2 lands successfully, his next challenge will be to shoot the ball, and then deploy a container to collect samples of the material raised from the surface by the impact.
The JAXA has tested the process on Earth, shooting a bullet into the gravel contained in a chamber designed to mimic the void of space. The researchers determined that the resulting rock debris would be small enough to be collected and returned to Earth for analysis. But it will take some time: samples should not arrive here before the end of 2020.
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