Elizabeth Howell reported in 2014 that a Japanese spacecraft has launched on an ambitious mission to blast a hole in an asteroid and return samples of the space rock back to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 asteroid mission blasted off Tuesday (Dec. 2) at 11:22 p.m. EST (0422 GMT Dec. 3) from the country's Tanegashima Space Center, where the local time at liftoff was 1:22 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 3. If all goes well, the spacecraft should return samples of the asteroid 1999 JU3 to Earth in late 2020, JAXA officials said.
Hayabusa2 is JAXA's bigger, bolder follow-up to its historic Hayabusa mission, which brought the first pristine samples of an asteroid to Earth in 2010 after its own seven-year mission. Like its predecessor, Hayabusa2 will use an ion engine to catch up with its target asteroid, and will also collect space rock samples and return them to a landing site in the Australian outback. But where the first Hayabusa mission only managed to retrieve a tiny amount of asteroid material, Hayabusa 2 is designed to get more out of its space rock visit.
Asteroid 1999 JU3 is a so-called carbonaceous, or C-type, space rock — a different type of asteroid than the rocky (S-type) asteroid Itokawa visited by the first Hayabusa. Scientists suspect asteroid 1999 JU3 holds water and organic materials — some of the building blocks of the solar system. "Minerals and seawater which form the Earth as well as materials for life are believed to be strongly connected in the primitive solar nebula in the early solar system," JAXA wrote in a description of the mission. "Thus we expect to clarify the origin of life by analyzing samples acquired from a primordial celestial body such as [this] asteroid to study organic matter and water in the solar system, and how they coexist while affecting each other."
In order to reach asteroid 1999 JU3, Hayabusa2 will conduct an Earth flyby in 2015 to pick up speed, then aim for a rendezvous with its target space rock in 2018. Hayabusa 2 is expected to orbit the asteroid for 18 months, landing three times to pick up sample material. While Hayabusa2 studies asteroid 1999 JU3 from orbit, it will deploy three rovers and a German/European lander called MASCOT, all of which will work independently on the surface to gather information on the asteroid's composition and history.
By early 2018, Hayabusa2 has imaged Ryugu from 920 km [570 miles], and we're starting to see the shape. It looks like … a dango-type asteroid! (Actually, that's a Japanese sweet dumpling) .If all goes according to plan. Hayabusa2 will study Ryugu in depth from orbit for about a year, dropping three rovers and a lander onto the asteroid's surface. The orbiting probe will also create a fresh crater on Ryugu using an explosives-laden impactor, then spiral down to snag samples of newly unearthed material. This asteroid sample will be sent to Earth, touching down in a special capsule in late 2020.
Hayabusa2 is following in the footsteps of the original Hayabusa probe, which made history in June 2010 by returning a small sample from the stony asteroid Itokawa. Ryugu is a different type of asteroid: a carbonaceous one, the type thought to have delivered lots of water and carbon-containing organic molecules to Earth via impacts long ago.
NASA has its own asteroid-sampling mission, with another carbonaceous space rock in its sights. The agency's OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to arrive at the 1,650-foot-wide (500 m) asteroid Bennu later this summer and return samples to Earth in September 2023.
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