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Just days away from its target, the asteroid Ryugu, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 captured the most detailed photos of the rocky object 900 meters wide.
Launched in 2014, Hayabusa2 is expected to arrive on June 27 and enter orbit around here next month. The spacecraft will deploy three rovers and a lander on the surface of Ryugu and collect samples that will be returned to Earth for analysis.
Ryugu will drop the rovers and the LG from a height of 12.5 miles (20 km) between September of this year and July 2019.
Hayabusa2 will also launch an impactor to hit the asteroid, creating a crater from which samples will be collected and returned to Earth in 2020.
Close-up images show that the Ryugu, which turns in the opposite direction of the Earth and the Sun, has a surface characterized by bumps, craters and sharp angles.
The data returned by the probe indicate that the asteroid has a rotation period of 7.5 hours and a vertical axis of rotation perpendicular to its orbit plane.
Ryugu's shape is similar to that of another asteroid, Bennu, the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid spacecraft back-up, which will arrive there in August of this year. .
"When I saw these images, I was surprised that Ryugu looks a lot like the destination of the US OSIRIS-REx mission, the asteroid Bennu, and also to the target MarcoPolo mission. R proposed by Europe, asteroid 2008 EV5, "said Makoto Yoshikawa, director of Hayabusa2 mission of the Japanese space agency JAXA.
He noted that Bennu and 2008 EV5 are smaller than Ryugu and spin faster than him, but all three have similar compositions.
"So, we have both differences and similarities that have combined to produce very similar shapes … why is this?"
To date, all the asteroids that have been explored have very different shapes from each other. Ryugu and Bennu could be the first two similarly shaped asteroids to ever be visited, Yoshikawa said.
Precise cartography of Ryugu is essential to find the best landing locations for rovers and lander. Mission scientists will have a better idea of their options once they have images of the entire asteroid.
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