Japan's Hayabusa2 probe makes second touchdown on distant Ryugu asteroid

Japan’s **Hayabusa2 probe** touched down on a distant asteroid on Thursday (July 11), the country’s space agency said, on a **mission to collect samples** that could shed light on the **history of the solar system** . “The control room received Doppler data showing that the probe appears to have touched down successfully,” Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) spokesman Takayuki Tomobe told Agence France-Presse. “But Doppler only shows the speed and altitude so we will need definitive confirmation,” he added. Additional data readings are expected later in the day. A successful landing on the Ryugu asteroid, about 300 million kilometres from Earth, would make it the second time the probe has touched down on the asteroid as part of a complex mission that has also involved sending rovers and robots. The mission hopes to collect pristine materials from beneath the surface of the asteroid that could provide insights into what the solar system was like at its birth, some 4.6 billion years ago. [caption id=“attachment_5235041” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Representational image of Hayabusa-2 attempting to touchdown on Ryugu. DLR[/caption] To get at those crucial materials, an “impactor” was fired from Hayabusa2 towards Ryugu in April, in a risky process that created a crater on the asteroid’s surface and stirred up material that had not previously been exposed to the atmosphere. “This is the second touchdown, but doing a touchdown is a challenge whether it’s the first or the second,” Mr Yuichi Tsuda, Hayabusa2 project manager, told reporters ahead of the mission. “The whole team will do our best so that we’ll be able to complete the operation,” he said. (Also read:  Japanese space agency releases visuals of Hayabusa2 spacecraft bombing asteroid Ryugu )

Extremely attractive materials

**Hayabusa2's first touchdown** was in February, when it **landed briefly on Ryugu and fired a bullet** into the surface to puff up dust for collection, before blasting back to its holding position. The second touchdown requires special preparations because any problems could mean the probe loses the precious materials already gathered during its first landing. A photo of the crater taken by Hayabusa2’s camera shows that parts of the asteroid’s surface are covered with materials that are “obviously different” from the rest of the surface, mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa told reporters. The probe is expected to make a brief touchdown on an area some 20m away from the centre of the crater to collect the unidentified materials believed to be “ejecta” from the blast. “It would be safe to say that extremely attractive materials are near the crater,” Tsuda said. The touchdown will be the last major part of Hayabusa2’s mission, and when the probe returns to Earth next year, scientists hope to learn more about the history of the solar system and even the origin of life from its samples. “I’m really looking forward to analysing these materials,” Yoshikawa said.

World is watching

The Hayabusa2 mission has attracted international attention, with Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May sending a video to the probe’s team ahead of the landing. “The world is watching. We love you, take care Hayabusa2,” the iconic musician told the team. At about the size of a large refrigerator and equipped with solar panels to keep it powered, Hayabusa2 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. Hayabusa2’s 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. The Hayabusa2 mission was launched in December 2014, and has a price tag of around 30 billion yen (S$376 million). The probe is scheduled to return to Earth with its samples in 2020. But its has already made history, including with the creation of the crater on Ryugu’s surface. In 2005, Nasa’s Deep Impact project succeeded in creating an artificial crater on a comet, but only for observation purposes.