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After a 42-month trip into space, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 finally reached its destination – a small rock cube named Ryugu, known as Asteroid 162173, 200 million miles away of the earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed the arrival of the satellite in an announcement earlier this week.
During his 18-month mission, the space probe will analyze the tiny rock with a series of tests, deploying three miniature rovers for the surface. Before leaving, it will even explode a new crater in the surface, collect some of the dislodged materials, and then return to Earth with the samples on board.
Arise and shine @ MASCOT2018 ! It's a new day and we arrived at #Ryugu ! Take a look … # hayabusa2 pic.twitter.com/5erImiqeOi
– haya2kun (@ haya2kun) June 28, 2018
The L & # 39 asteroid was named after a dragon palace of a Japanese folk tale. In history, a Japanese fisherman emerges from the underwater lair with a box full of treasures.
It is technically classified near Earth object (NEO) because it orbits on an elliptical path from Mars to Earth and vice versa. There is no chance that it will hit the Earth, however, at least not in the few hundred years to come.
The spacecraft used its propellers to maneuver into a stable orbit within 12 miles of Ryugu, where he began analyzing the asteroid. remainder of his mission. Ryugu, dotted with rocks, is diamond-shaped and has an equatorial ridge. As Earth Sky points out, its appearance is similar to that of the asteroid Bennu, a target NASA's Osiris-REx mission will encounter in 2020.
The mission, launched in December 2014, features four small landers. Three come from Japan (called MINERVA-II) and the other comes from Germany (called MASCOT-1, for Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout). These are not the conventional rovers you know, like those taking selfies on Mars. Because the Ryugu half a mile wide has a very low gravity, the small landers only have the weight of a drop of water here on Earth.
So the undercarriages do not have wheels – internal shift weights that allow them to "flop" across the surface with short jumps.
Hayabusa 2 will also blow things up while he is there. With the help of a "space gun", the probe will project a copper projectile to the surface to create a landing crater and expose material beneath the surface. During a brief landing on the surface, the probe picks up some debris and arranges them for the return trip.
By 2020, the probe will deposit the samples in a saucer-shaped back capsule that "Together with all of you, we have become the first witnesses of the Ryugu asteroid," said Yuichi Tsuda, head of the project. "I think it's an incredible honor as we carry out mission operations."
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