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What did Hayabusa2 when he landed?
Hayabusa2 attempted to collect materials on the rugged surface of the asteroid with the help of a device called sampler horn.
To make enough fragments, the craft would have fired a projectile tantalum of metal – essentially a bullet – on the surface of the asteroid. Earlier this month, mission officials presented their simulation of this procedure on Earth to demonstrate that it would be able to succeed.
The spaceship is carry several projectiles so that he can do more than one attempt at a hit. In March or April, Hayabusa2 should also send an explosive package called a small cabin impactor to the surface of Ryugu to create an artificial crater. Hayabusa2 could take another sample of the material exposed in the crater.
Why are they studying this asteroid?
Asteroids are debris left by the disk of gas and dust that formed around the young sun and never completely merged to form a planet. They contain almost virgin compounds that help to tell what the primitive solar system looked like 4.5 billion years ago.
Ryugu, as dark as coal, is a type-C asteroid, or carbon, which means that it's filled with carbon molecules called organic substances, possibly including amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Such molecules are not always associated with biology and can be formed from chemical reactions in deep space, but asteroids could have seeded the Earth with the organic matter that has led to life.
About three-quarters of the asteroids in the solar system fall into type C.
This space rock was discovered in 1999 and was not named until 2015. Ryugu owes its name to Ryugu-jo, the Dragon's Palace – a magical underwater palace in a Japanese folk tale.
Does not NASA do something like that too?
Yes. The Osiris-Rex space probe is currently studying another carbon-rich asteroid, Bennu, which will also collect samples and send them back to Earth. Bennu is even smaller than Ryugu, about 500 meters wide. Osiris-rex will not return with his samples until 2023.
Japanese and NASA scientists plan to exchange samples of both asteroids to compare similarities and differences.
Has Japan ever done this before?
As the 2 indicates in Hayabusa2, it is the second time that the Japanese space agency JAXA sends a spacecraft to an asteroid.
Hayabusa2 is an improved version of Hayabusa, who visited a stony asteroid, Itokawa, in 2005. Despite several technical problems at Itokawa, Hayabusa returned a capsule to Earth in 2010 containing 1500 particles from the asteroid.
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