Japan’s space program JAXA has had a very eventful 24 hours. The group’s Hayabusa2 asteroid probe, which arrived at its target Ryugu last year, performed its most challenging maneuver yet by leaving its orbit around the rock and touching down on its surface for just a moment. But that’s not all it did.
The plan all along has been for Hayabusa2 to retrieve samples of the diamond-shaped asteroid in order to bring them back to Earth, but snatching a sample isn’t as easy as it sounds. In order to efficiently collect dust from the rock during its brief touchdown the spacecraft had to fire a bullet into Ryugu, and it had to do all of this without direct control from its handlers on Earth over 180 million miles away.
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Japan’s asteroid probe shot a bullet at a space rock, and it’s a very big deal originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 at 18:35:41 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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