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The Franco – German LG for Asteroid – Scanning Mobile Phone (MASCOT) captured this photo of the Ryugu asteroid during the landing operations of Oct. 3, 2018. The Shadow from the undercarriage is visible at the top right.
Credit: German Aerospace Center (DLR)
A small European shoebox-sized probe landed successfully last night on the asteroid Ryugu. His first photo is a doozy: a "selfie" shadow showing the space rock just before landing.
The photo, released today (Oct. 3), was captured by MASCOT, the asteroid surface scout, who landed on Ryugu after being released from his Japanese mothership, Hayabusa2. , from a height of only 51 meters. It took 20 minutes to lander to reach Ryugu's surface. The first picture of MASCOT revealed a rocky and bare terrain, and even the shadow of the probe in the upper right corner of the image. The Ryugu asteroid was about 300 million kilometers from Earth at the time, said DLR officials.
"The camera worked perfectly," said Ralf Jaumann, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) who built MASCOT, in a statement. "The first images of the camera of the team are therefore safe." [The Greatest Asteroid Encounters of All Time!]
Jaumann is the scientific director of MASCOT's MASCAM camera, which took 20 photos of Ryugu during his short run to the surface of the asteroid. MASCOT's battery is expected to last about 16 hours after landing, DLR officials said.
The MASCAM camera is not the only instrument onboard MASCOT. The 22-pound The Lander (10 kilograms) contains a total of four instruments: the DLR camera, a radiometer also built by DLR, a magnetometer built by the Technical University of Braunschweig and an infrared spectrometer from the French space agency CNES. The undercarriage can jump using a swingarm inside its body.
The MASCOT magnetometer is already transmitting data at home on conditions close to Ryugu.
"The measurements show the relatively weak field of the solar wind and the very strong magnetic disturbances caused by the spacecraft," said Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier of the Technical University of Braunschweig in the same statement from the DLR. "At the time of separation, we expected a clear decrease in the interference field – and we could clearly recognize it."
The Japanese space shuttle Hayabusa2 successfully dropped the MASCOT lander on the Ryugu asteroid on October 3, 2018 (Japan time). Left: Illustration of the MASCOT undercarriage separating from the mother ship Hayabusa2. Right: Illustration of a MASCOT landing on the surface of the Ryugu asteroid.
Credit: JAXA
MASCOT is a joint venture of DLR and CNES, and is the third lander to land on the Ryugu asteroid in recent weeks. He succeeds two tiny Japanese robots, named MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B, which landed on Ryugu at the end of September. Another MINERVA lander and an impact probe will be released in 2019, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which oversees the Hayabusa mission2.
"With MASCOT, we have the unique opportunity to study the most important material of the solar system directly on an asteroid," Jaumann said.
In addition to the deployment of the landing gear, the $ 150 million JAXA Hayabusa2 satellite was designed to study the Ryugu asteroid with unprecedented detail. The probe will also collect samples of the asteroid and bring them back to Earth in December 2020. The JAXA launched the Hayabusa2 mission in 2014.
Later this year, the US OSIRIS-Rex probe is scheduled to make an appointment with the Earth's asteroid, Bennu, for NASA. This spacecraft is scheduled to arrive in Bennu on December 31 and collect samples that will be returned to Earth in 2023.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him. @tariqjmalik. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+ Original article on Space.com.
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