Hayabusa2

Hayabusa2

Spacecraft· JAXAactive

Hayabusa2 — JAXA mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu (2018–2019); returned samples to Earth in 2020 and continues to an extended-mission target.

Open in 3D viewSee Hayabusa2 in the live, interactive 3D map

Key facts

Current speed
30.6 km/s
Distance from Sun
0.933 AU
Status
Active
Launched
2014

Mission & specifications

Mission

Operator
JAXA
Launched
December 3, 2014
Status
Active

Trajectory

Current speed
30.6 km/s
Distance from the Sun
0.933 AU
Distance from Earth
0.443 AU
Distance from Venus
0.286 AU

Cost & funding

Program cost
$3.00 × 10⁸ USD

Mission

Hayabusa2 was Japan's bold follow-up to the troubled first Hayabusa, and it executed a far more ambitious mission almost flawlessly. Launched on 3 December 2014, it travelled to Ryugu, a dark, carbon-rich, spinning-top-shaped near-Earth asteroid thought to hold water and organic material from the early Solar System, arriving in June 2018. Rather than a single grab, Hayabusa2 carried out a whole campaign. It deployed several small hopping rovers and a European-built lander, MASCOT, onto Ryugu's surface — the first rovers ever to operate on an asteroid — returning pictures from the boulder-strewn ground. In February 2019 it briefly touched down to collect surface material. Then it did something unprecedented: it fired a copper projectile into the asteroid to blast out an artificial crater, and in July 2019 descended into that fresh hole to scoop up pristine subsurface grains never exposed to space. Its samples — about 5 grams in all — parachuted down in the Australian outback on 6 December 2020. Analysis revealed water-bearing minerals and more than twenty amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, strengthening the idea that such asteroids could have seeded the early Earth with the ingredients for life. The spacecraft itself flew on toward another asteroid for an extended mission.

  1. 2014Launch toward RyuguLaunch

    Japan's ambitious follow-up departs for a carbon-rich, water-bearing asteroid.

  2. 2018Arrival at RyuguArrival

    Reaches the spinning-top-shaped asteroid to begin a campaign of landings and sampling.

  3. 2018Rovers land on RyuguDeployment

    Deploys hopping rovers and the MASCOT lander — the first rovers to operate on an asteroid.

  4. 2019Blasting an artificial craterImpactor

    Fires a copper projectile into Ryugu to expose pristine subsurface material.

  5. 2019Second touchdownLanding

    Descends into the fresh crater to collect grains never exposed to space.

  6. 2020Samples return to EarthLanding

    Delivers ~5 g of Ryugu containing water-bearing minerals and amino acids.

Images

Hayabusa2 approaching asteroid Ryugu
DLR German Aerospace Center (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons

Images from open archives · credit shown per image