Landing in Japan: MASCOT joins the rovers and lands on the asteroid Eyugu | Science | New

The Japanese space agency JAXA made history on September 21st by bringing two rovers on a 1 km asteroid.

This asteroid, called Ryugu, houses two creatively named rovers, the Rovers 1A and 1B, where they will remain in the future as part of a mission that will allow robots to capture images of the surface and temperature of the giant rock.

Now they have been joined on the asteroid, located at 280 million km, by another component of the space agency.

A shoe-size undercarriage, called the mobile surface asteroid (MASCOT), was deployed from the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2, placed in orbit around the Asteroid, and experts say that it was a perfectly fluid maneuver.

Tra-Mi Ho, Project Manager at MASCOT, Institute for Space Systems DLR Bremen, Germany, said: "It could not have been better.

"Thanks to the telemetry of the LG, we could see that it was separating from the mothership and coming into contact with the surface of the asteroid about 20 minutes later."

The machine, which was a German and French collaboration, is already fulfilling its aim on Ryugu by collecting data with its four instruments: a camera, a radiometer, a spectrometer and a magnetometer.

MASCOT has already captured 20 images, most of which come from its descent to the asteroid, and some of the data has already been relayed to Earth.

Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, a member of the MASCOT team at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, said: "The measurements show the relatively weak field of the solar wind and the very strong magnetic disturbances caused by the vessel space.

"At the time of separation, we expected a clear decrease in the interference field – and we could clearly recognize it."

The mission marks the first time that a rover lands on an asteroid.

This mission differs from the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which landed on a comet in 2016, as this probe was only briefly in line and remained motionless on the surface.

Hayabusa-2 has reached the asteroid, which had been left since the beginnings of our solar system, but the rovers have just been deployed.

The rock is known as a relic and belongs to a primitive type of asteroid, formerly 162173 Ryugu.

If the Japanese mission went as planned, rock studies could pave the way for a better understanding of the evolution of space and the Earth.