[ad_1]
As expected, she only touched her surface for a few seconds while collecting dust from her floor.
The results must tell us about the formation of our solar system, just that. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 managed to sneak up on an asteroid Friday, February 22, and collect dust from the soil of this interstellar body, all to more than 300 million kilometers of our planet.
As expected, Hayabusa2 only took a few seconds on the asteroid Ryugu, time to launch a projectile – a kind of bullet – to clear dust and take a sample. Another slightly different sampling operation is planned in several weeks.
At first anxious, the mission leaders began to applaud with joy when the probe has given a positive signal. It will take several days to gain absolute certainty that the soil samples have been collected, "but the probability is high", according to officials.
Hayabusa2 was launched on December 3, 2014, and traveled 3.2 billion kilometers to reach its destination in June 2018. The asteroid, however, is only 340 million kilometers from Earth, but it is impossible to go there in a straight line.
His target, Ryugu, is a very old diamond-shaped asteroid that dates back to the formation of the solar system. The ultimate goal of the mission is to contribute to enriching the knowledge of our space environment "to better apprehend the appearance of life on Earth"according to the Japanese Space Exploration Agency.
The probe was initially to land elsewhere in October, but it was necessary to find a place not too rough so as not to damage this fragile machine, which took longer than expected. In the end, it was a space of only 6 meters in diameter that had to be aimed.
In October, she had dropped on the surface of this celestial body a small Franco-German robot who had worked to badyze the composition of its soil. Hayabusa2, who has returned to orbit the asteroid, has yet to make several more attempts to land before returning to Earth, expected in 2020.
Read also
Source link
