Hayabusa2
Hayabusa2 — JAXA mission to asteroid 162173 Ryugu (2018–2019); returned samples to Earth in 2020 and continues to an extended-mission target.
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- JAXA
- Launched
- December 3, 2014
- Status
- Active
Trajectory
- Current speed
- 26.8 km/s
- Computed from the cached state vector
- Distance from the Sun
- 1.05 AU
- Computed from the cached position
- Distance from Earth
- 0.508 AU
- Computed from cached positions
- Distance from Venus
- 0.499 AU
- Computed from cached positions
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.
- 2014Launch toward RyuguLaunch
Japan's ambitious follow-up departs for a carbon-rich, water-bearing asteroid.
Reaches the spinning-top-shaped asteroid to begin a campaign of landings and sampling.
Deploys hopping rovers and the MASCOT lander — the first rovers to operate on an asteroid.
Fires a copper projectile into Ryugu to expose pristine subsurface material.
Descends into the fresh crater to collect grains never exposed to space.
Delivers ~5 g of Ryugu containing water-bearing minerals and amino acids.
At 5.3 km/s, about 400 m from the surface of a small asteroid made of two lobes in contact.
Images
Images from open archives · credit shown per image