TOKYO -- The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) released a video on March 5 showing its space probe Hayabusa2 touching down on the asteroid Ryugu.
The images were taken by a camera on the spacecraft that was created using donations of about 12 million yen from the general public. They show pieces of rocks and stones on the asteroid's surface being raised like confetti when a tubular device to collect materials touched down and bounced up.
JAXA's Hirotaka Sawada, who helped develop the Hayabusa2, shows a camera on the probe that was created using donations from the general public at its facility in the city of Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Dec. 26, 2013. (Mainichi/Kimitaka Takeichi)
Project manager Yuichi Tsuda said at a press conference in Tokyo, "They are really fantastic images. I felt a thrill when I saw them for the first time." He added, "Through the donations we were able to take such images. Thank you."
(Japanese original by Tomohiro Ikeda, Science & Environment News Department, and Etsuko Nagayama, Opinion Group)
Quelle: The Mainichi
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JAXA releases asteroid touchdown video
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released photographs and video showing its space probe Hayabusa2 touching down on the asteroid Ryugu.
The images, released Tuesday, show sand and rocks flying up after the probe fired a bullet into the asteroid to collect samples. The probe is scheduled to make the first-ever attempt to create a crater on the surface of an asteroid in early April, then make a second landing near the crater in May or later.
Hayabusa2 landed on the surface of Ryugu for several seconds on Feb. 22. A camera attached to the side of the probe showed a cylindrical sample-collection device making contact with the ground.
Sand and rocks ranging from several millimeters to tens of centimeters in size were sent flying by the bullet’s impact and the firing of the probe’s engine. Due to the asteroid’s slight gravity, these are seen hovering in space for a long time.
The geology of Ryugu’s surface “appears to be rough like pumice and quite fragile. Fine, confetti-like material was also kicked up, which we believe to be part of the stratiform structure,” Hayabusa2 Project Scientist and Nagoya University Prof. Seiichiro Watanabe said at a press conference.
The camera was developed using about ¥12 million donated from everyday citizens.
“These wonderful images were possible because of your donations. We are truly grateful,” JAXA Project Manager Yuichi Tsuda said.
The landing site has been nicknamed “tamatebako,” after the mysterious box that appears in the “Urashima Taro” folktale, according to the project team.
JAXA also indicated that the original plan to perform three landings would be reduced to two, mostly because the sample size obtained in the February landing was sufficient.
After the crater is made and more samples are collected in the second landing, a third will probably not be necessary, the agency has determined.
Quelle: The Japan News
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Update: 20.03.2019
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Hayabusa2 probe set to fire explosive at asteroid to make crater to collect samples
TOKYO -- The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on March 18 that its Hayabusa2 space probe will drop an explosive on the asteroid Ryugu on April 5 to create an artificial crater as part of an experiment to collect underground samples to seek possible clues to the origin of the solar system.
Hayabusa2 landed on the asteroid on Feb. 22 and JAXA officials say the probe has likely collected rock samples.
The probe is scheduled to detach a device loaded with explosives some 500 meters away from Ryugu. The device will set off the explosives using a timer some 40 minutes later and launch a copper "impactor" weighing about 2 kilograms into the asteroid's surface.
The target point is several hundreds of meters away from where the space probe first touched down. The mission will require the spacecraft to move quickly to the other side of the asteroid so it won't get hit by flying shards from the blast. A detached camera will shoot the moment of impact.
JAXA will analyze the size and shape of the crater, and how rocks fly off in a bid to collect underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.
Koji Wada, chief researcher of the Chiba Institute of Technology who is in charge of the analysis of the experiment, said, "I want to reveal the origin of heavenly bodies which repeatedly collided and broke up. I'm excited that we will be able to conduct this experiment on a real asteroid."
Quelle: The Mainichi
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Update: 21.03.2019
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Ryugu latest: asteroid is a partially dehydrated ‘pile of rubble’
Japanese researchers publish three studies on the object of Hayabusa2’s attention. Richard A Lovett reports.
A one-kilometre-wide asteroid known as 162173 Ryugu, currently being mapped by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft, looks like a giant “pile of rubble” shaped like a spinning top, planetary scientists report in a trio of papers in the journal Science.
The asteroid also has extremely low density, indicating that it is riddled with porous gaps, much like a chunk of Styrofoam or Swiss cheese.
To determine the asteroid’s shape, the scientists used photographs from multiple angles, and laser range-finding mapping of its topography to create a 3D model.
Its porosity was calculated by watching as the spacecraft fell to within 850 metres of the surface, then rose to 5.4 kilometres. Based on this, says Sei-ichiro Watanabe, of Nagoya University, Japan, it was possible to determine the asteroid’s mass, volume, and average density.
The third of these are so low that gaps of various sizes must make up half of the asteroid’s volume, he says – assuming it is made of the same type of minerals as a class of meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites.
The spinning top shape, he adds, is probably a leftover from its youth, when rapid rotation deformed it into a flattened shape with a prominent equatorial ridge that still persists, even though its rotation has now slowed to a sedate 7.6 hours.
Why this ridge has not slowly flattened out, Watanabe says, is an open question, but he thinks it’s because the surface materials on Ryugu must not easily avalanche.
“It seems the friction angle of materials on Ryugu is large enough, so the relaxation process would be rather slow,” he says.
In another study, a team led by Seiji Sugita, of the University of Tokyo, Japan, used data from the spacecraft’s near-infrared spectrometer to find that water-containing minerals are “ubiquitous” across Ryugu’s surface.
That said, these materials appear to have been “thermally metamorphosed” and partially dehydrated.
Most likely, Sugita says, Ryugu stems from a parent body that was formed about 4.56 billion years ago, at the birth of the Solar System.
That body experienced a high level of rock-water reactions in its interior, which formed the hydrated minerals now found on the asteroid.
After that, however, it went through a partial dehydration process, possibly due to internal heating that caused some of these hydrated minerals to break down, thereby losing water to space.
Then, about a billion years ago, a large collision broke up the parent body.
One possible parent body would have been the predecessor to the Polana collisional family, named for the 38-kilometre asteroid known as 1112 Polona, the parent of which broke up 1.4 billion years ago. The other would have been the parent body for 495 Eulalia, a similar-sized asteroid and the product of a break-up 800 million years ago.
Debris from the collision then re-accumulated into rubble piles, one of which became Ryugu, or perhaps its more immediate parent body, from which Ryugu was generated via yet another impact.
That said, it’s too soon to attempt to generalise these findings to other asteroids, Watanabe says, because Hayabusu2 is not the only mission currently investigating a near-earth asteroid.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is currently orbiting the slightly smaller asteroid called 101955 Bennu, and is also expected to announce its initial findings very soon.
“Comparative study of Ryugu and Bennu will tell us their commonalities and differences,” Watanabe says.
Meanwhile, he adds, Hayabusa2 is a sample-return mission, designed to collect material from the asteroid’s surface and bring it back to Earth for analysis by the end of next year. One goal of the current studies is to pick the right place from which to collect the sample – ideally one that helps us understand how the asteroid got its spinning-top shape.
Another goal is to understand how asteroids such as Ryugu helped bring water to Earth, says Kohei Kitazato, from the University of Aizu, Fukushima, and lead author of the third paper published in Science.
“In order to know how much asteroids like Ryugu contributed to terrestrial water, it is important to understand how much water had been preserved in their interior,” he says.
“Our observations on Ryugu strongly suggest that the abundance of water bearing materials (and organics) on asteroids is controlled by dehydration due to radiogenic heat during its early history.
“This may have influenced how much water and organics Earth received from the asteroid belt, when life was born.”
Studying these asteroids may also be important to understanding the threats they may pose to our future, if someday we find ourselves faced with such a body on collision course with Earth.
In April, Watanabe says, an experiment called the Small Carry-on Impactor Experiment will shoot a 2.5-kilogram copper bullet at the asteroid in order to find out how its surface layer is glued together. The results could be useful if, someday in the future, we find ourselves faced with the question of how to divert such a body before it hits us.
Quelle: COSMOS
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Japan asteroid probe in 'tantalizing' solar system discoveries
Ryugu is a carbon-rich C-type asteroid about 900m wide.
An unmanned Japanese spacecraft orbiting an asteroid has made surprising discoveries that scientists say will improve understanding about the origin's of the Earth's water and help search for life in other solar systems.
Scientists working on Japan's Hayabusa 2 space mission said that by using a wide range of cameras and instruments to collect images and data about the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, they had made some "tantalizing discoveries."
"The primary one being the amount of water, or lack of it, Ryugu seems to possess," said Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo's Department of Earth and Planetary Science in a press statement as the mission released its initial findings.
"It's far dryer than we expected, and given Ryugu is quite young (by asteroid standards) at around 100 million years old, this suggests its parent body was much largely devoid of water too," Sugita added.
The finding is significant, he said, because of all of Earth's water is thought to have come came from local asteroids, distant comets and the nebula or dust cloud that became our sun.
"The presence of dry asteroids in the asteroid belt would change models used to describe the chemical composition of the early solar system," he added.
The discovery also has implication for finding extraterrestrial life. "There are uncountably many solar systems out there and the search for life beyond ours needs direction," Sugita said. "Our findings can refine models that could help limit which kinds of solar systems the search for life should target."
The mission's three initial papers published in the journal Science on Tuesday described the mass, size, shape, density, spin and geological properties of the asteroid, a porous "pile of rubble" shaped like a spinning top.
Ryugu is extremely dark and looks blacker than coal to our eyes.
The Japanese space agency, JAXA, research has also benefited from cooperation with NASA, which has its own probe, OSIRIS-REx, exploring a different asteroid known as Bennu.
NASA and JAXA share data from their respective missions and this cooperation has thrown up a further surprise.
Both Bennu and Ryugu are extremely dark, spinning-top shaped asteroids that are covered in large boulders, but the latest findings show that Ryugu is a lot drier.
Researchers had expected the two asteroids to have similar levels of water, but the discrepancy has opened up new avenues for future research.
"Thanks to the parallel missions of Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, we can finally address the question of how these two asteroids came to be," Sugita said. "That Bennu and Ryugu may be siblings yet exhibit some strikingly different traits implies there must be many exciting and mysterious astronomical processes we have yet to explore."
Other scientists shared Sugita's optimism. "It seems that the asteroid formed as a spinning rubble pile from a previous generation of asteroidal parent bodies, and that those parent bodies had undergone thermal or shock metamorphism," said John Bridges from the space research center at UK's University of Leicester.
"This is far from the old stereotype of a potato-shaped, inert and perhaps rather dull, gray asteroid," he added. "Ryugu shows that asteroids have recorded an incredibly rich history."
Some scientists echoed Sugita's initial reaction to the discovery of the asteroid's lack of water, which he surmised by saying, "what felt limiting is now enlightening."
Matthew Genge, an earth and planetary scientist from Imperial College London, said Hayabusa 2 had aimed to be the first to sample a C-type asteroid rich in water and carbon-rich objects because they are thought to preserve the best record of the earliest stages of the solar system.
He added that Ryugu appeared to be a type of asteroid that had had its history of the early solar system "overwritten" by a heating experience.
Quelle: CNN
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Update: 4.03.2019
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Hayabusa2 to start descent for new mission
Japan's Hayabusa2 space probe is set to start descending toward an asteroid in about two days on a new mission to create an artificial crater on its surface.
Hayabusa2 has been observing the asteroid Ryugu, about 340 million kilometers from Earth.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, says the probe will make the world's first attempt to create an artificial crater on an asteroid and study its interior.
Hayabusa2 is scheduled to start its descent from 20,000 meters above Ryugu at around 1 p.m. Thursday, Japan time.
The probe is to continue to move down slowly and, at 500 meters above the surface, release a device called an impactor at around 11 a.m. Friday.
The impactor is designed to explode 40 minutes later to fire a metal object into the asteroid's surface at a speed of 7,200 kilometers per hour.
Mission Manager Makoto Yoshikawa told reporters that his team will take on a new challenge that would have been inconceivable with Hayabusa2's predecessor. He said team members are tense, but will be united to successfully conduct the mission they've carefully prepared for.
The mission follows Hayabusa2's touchdown on the asteroid in February. JAXA believes the probe collected rock samples as planned.
Quelle: NHK
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Update: 4.04.2019
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Making a dent: Japan probe prepares to blast asteroid
Stone and sand were thrown up on the Ryugu asteroid after Hayabusa2 fired a bullet into the surface in February to puff up dust for collection Stone and sand were thrown up on the Ryugu asteroid after Hayabusa2 fired a bullet into the surface in February to puff up dust for collectionJAXA/AFP/File
A Japanese probe began descending towards an asteroid on Thursday on a mission to blast a crater into its surface and collect material that could shed light on the solar system's evolution.
The mission will be the latest in a series of explorations carried out by the Japanese space agency's Hayabusa2 probe and could reveal more about the origin of life on Earth.
But the task scheduled for Friday will be the riskiest yet of Hayabusa2's investigations, and involves the release of a device filled with explosives.
The so-called "small carry-on impactor", a cone-shaped device capped with a copper bottom, will emerge from Hayabusa2 on Friday, after the probe has arrived just 500 metres above the asteroid Ryugu.
The probe will then depart the area, and the impactor is programmed to explode 40 minutes later, propelling the copper bottom towards Ryugu, where it should gouge a crater into the surface of the asteroid that sits 300 million kilometres from Earth.
Hayabusa2 will move away from the area to avoid being damaged by debris from the explosion or the collision with Ryugu.
As it does so it will release a camera slightly above the site of the detonation that should be able to capture images of the event.
The camera should be able to transmit those images, but it is unclear when the first confirmation of the mission's success will come.
It will take two weeks for the probe itself to return to its "home position" near Ryugu after the detonation and impact.
"We are thrilled to see what will happen when the impactor collides with the asteroid," Takashi Kubota, engineering researcher at the Japanese space agency (JAXA), told reporters earlier this week.
The crater could be as large as 10 metres in diameter if the surface is sandy, but a smaller three metres across if it is rocky, according to JAXA scientists.
- 'Dragon Palace' -
NASA's Deep Impact project succeeded in creating an artificial crater on a comet in 2005, but only for observation purposes.
The aim of the crater on Ryugu is to throw up "fresh" material from under the asteroid's surface that could shed light on the early days of the solar system.
In February, Hayabusa2 touched down briefly on Ryugu and fired a bullet into the surface to puff up dust for collection, before blasting back to its holding position.
The asteroid is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water from some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was born.
The Hayabusa2 mission, with a price tag of around 30 billion yen ($270 million), was launched in December 2014 and is scheduled to return to Earth with its samples in 2020.
Photos of Ryugu -- which means "Dragon Palace" in Japanese and refers to a castle at the bottom of the ocean in an ancient Japanese tale -- show the asteroid has a rough surface full of boulders.
Hayabusa2 observes the surface of the asteroid with its camera and sensing equipment but has also dispatched two tiny MINERVA-II rover robots as well as the French-German robot MASCOT to help surface observation.
At about the size of a large fridge, Hayabusa2 is equipped with solar panels and is the successor to JAXA's first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa -- Japanese for falcon.
That probe returned with dust samples from a smaller, potato-shaped asteroid in 2010, despite various setbacks during its epic seven-year odyssey and was hailed as a scientific triumph.
Quelle: FRANC24
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Hayabusa2 begins descent to make artificial crater
Japanese space probe Hayabusa2 is making a descent toward the asteroid Ryugu in a new mission to create an artificial crater for a study of the celestial body's interior. The asteroid is located 340 million kilometers from Earth.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, says the probe began its descent toward Ryugu from an altitude of 20,000 meters at around 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, Japan time.
According to the plan, Hayabusa2 will release a device called the "impactor" shortly before 11 a.m. on Friday when it is 500 meters from the asteroid.
Forty minutes later, the "impactor" will explode and shoot a metal object into the asteroid's surface at 2 kilometers per second to create an artificial crater.
JAXA is planning to have Hayabusa2 attempt a second landing on Ryugu at a later date to collect rock samples from the crater.
The probe made its first landing on the asteroid in February.
JAXA officials have said the probe is believed to have collected rock samples during that time on the asteroid.
Quelle: NHK
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Update: 5.04.2019
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Japan spacecraft drops explosive on asteroid to make crater
Japan's space agency says an explosive dropped from its Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully blasted the surface of an asteroid for the first time to form a crater and pave the way for the collection of underground samples
This image released by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows the asteroid Ryugu Friday, April 5, 2019. Japan's space agency JAXA said its Hayabusa2 spacecraft released an explosive onto the asteroid to make a crater on its surface and collect underground samples to find possible clues to the origin of the solar system. Friday's mission is the riskiest for Hayabusa2, as it has to immediately get away so it won't get hit by flying shards from the blast. JAXA
Japan's space agency said an explosive dropped Friday from its Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully blasted the surface of an asteroid for the first time to form a crater and pave the way for the collection of underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.
Friday's mission was the riskiest for Hayabusa2 because it had to immediately move away so it wouldn't get hit by flying shards from the blast.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Hayabusa2 dropped a small explosive box which sent a copper ball the size of a baseball slamming into the asteroid, and that data confirmed the spacecraft had safely evacuated and remained intact. JAXA later confirmed the impact from images transmitted from a camera left behind by the spacecraft which showed the impactor being released and fine particles later spraying dozens of meters (yards) out from a spot on the asteroid.
"The mission was a success," JAXA project manager Yuichi Tsuda said, beaming. "It is highly likely to have made a crater."
JAXA plans to send Hayabusa2, which was moved to the other side of the asteroid, back to the site after dust and debris settle for observations and to collect samples of material from the new crater that was unexposed to the sun or space rays. Scientists hope the samples will help them understand the history of the solar system, since asteroids are left over material from its formation.
No such samples have been recovered. In a 2005 "deep impact" mission to a comet, NASA observed fragments after blasting the surface but did not collect them.
Last month, JAXA announced that a group of scientists participating in the Hayabusa2 mission had detected hydroxyl-bearing minerals on the asteroid by analyzing near-infrared spectrometer readings by the spacecraft. It said that could help explain where the Earth's water came from. The results were published in the online edition of Science magazine.
"So far, Hayabusa2 has done everything as planned, and we are delighted," mission leader Makoto Yoshikawa said earlier Friday. "But we still have more missions to achieve and it's too early for us to celebrate."
Hayabusa2 successfully touched down on a small level area on the boulder-strewn asteroid in February, when it also collected some surface dust and small debris. The craft is scheduled to leave the asteroid at the end of 2019 and bring the surface fragments and underground samples back to Earth in late 2020.
The asteroid, named Ryugu after an undersea palace in a Japanese folktale, is about 300 million kilometers (180 million miles) from Earth.
Quelle: abcNews
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Hayabusa-2: Japanese probe likely to have 'bombed' an asteroid
The Japanese Hayabusa-2 spacecraft is thought to have detonated an explosive charge on the asteroid it is exploring.
The idea was to create an artificial crater on the object known as Ryugu.
If this is successful - and the early indications are positive - the probe will later return to gather samples from the gouged depression.
Scientists believe these samples could help them better understand how Earth and the other planets were formed in the early Solar System.
An apparent spray of debris is captured by the deployed camera
The explosive device, called the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI), was released from Hayabusa-2 on Friday. The SCI, a 14kg conical container, was packed with plastic explosive intended to punch a 10m-wide hole in the asteroid.
Because of the debris that would have been thrown up in this event, Hayabusa-2 manoeuvred itself before the detonation to the far side of 800m-wide Ryugu - out of harm's way and out of sight.
But the probe left a small camera behind called DCAM3 to observe the explosion. Images returned to Earth later on Friday appeared to show a spray of debris emerging from the limb of the asteroid, indicating the experiment to excavate a crater very probably worked.
Hayabusa-2 will, in a few weeks, return to the crater to try to collect its pristine samples. Because they will come from within the asteroid, they will not have been exposed to the harsh environment of space.
Bombardment with cosmic radiation over the aeons is thought to alter the surfaces of these planetary building blocks. So, scientists want to get at a fresh sample that hasn't been changed by this process.
Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type asteroid. It's a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System, and therefore records the conditions and chemistry of that time - some 4.5 billion years ago.
A video of the SCI being tested on Earth can be seen below:
Speaking at last month's 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), project scientist Sei-ichiro Watanabe said the experiment would also "provide us with information of the strength of the surface layer of Ryugu".
This could help shed light on how the asteroid developed its characteristic "spinning top" shape.
Ryugu has a characteristic "spinning top" shape
Scientific results suggest Ryugu was formed from loose debris that was blasted off a bigger asteroid and then came back together to form a secondary object.
At the LPSC meeting, held in The Woodlands in Texas, Yuichi Tsuda, the mission's project manager, told me how the team decided where on Ryugu to generate the artificial crater.
"There are two things: the first priority is to make a hole where we can easily identify a crater... so, easy observation, not too hard, not too bumpy," he said.
"Second, somewhere that's as feasible as possible in terms of landing... if those two don't meet together, we go with the first priority."
Scientists may command Hayabusa-2 to descend into the crater at a later date to collect a pristine sample of rock. But they will only do so if there is no risk of the spacecraft colliding with a boulder.
