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The Japanese space agency has just hit an asteroid with an explosive copper bomb in the hope of learning more about the solar system.
The country's Hayabusa2 space shuttle on Friday created a crater in the asteroid firing on the "small cabin impactor" – essentially a metal cannonball the size of a baseball -.
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, has confirmed the impact with images transmitted by a camera left by the spacecraft.
The photos showed a jet of fine particles from tens of meters from a point on the asteroid, named Ryugu.
"The mission was a success," said Yuichi Tsuda, JAXA Project Manager. "It is very likely that he made a crater."
However, Hayabusa2 was risky – he had to move away quickly to avoid being hit by flying debris after the explosive was deployed.
Once the dust settles, the JAXA plans to return the spacecraft to the crater to collect samples of materials not exposed to the sun or the rays of space.
Scientists hope that the samples will help them obtain information about the solar system, as asteroids are material remains of their formation.
Such samples have never been collected. In a similar mission in 2005, NASA exploded the surface of a comet but never recovered the fragments.
Last month, scientists detected Ryugu's hydroxylated minerals after examining near infrared spectrometer readings from Hayabusa2.
In announcing the results, JAXA said they could help explain the origin of the Earth's water.
Hayabusa2 is expected to leave the asteroid by the end of 2019 and bring back surface fragments and underground samples to Earth by the end of 2020.
Ryugu, the asteroid, named after an underwater palace in a Japanese folk tale, is located some 180 million kilometers from the Earth.
With postal wires
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