Japan ’s Hayabusa2 task experienced a ( hopefully ) minor setback yesterday when the spacecraft fail to discharge a exercise academic term during cooking for its much - anticipated touchdown on the Ryugu asteroid .
found by JAXA in December 2014 , the Hayabusa2 space vehicle will attempt to extract fabric from the surface of Ryugu , a 3,000 - foot - wide ( 900 meter ) asteroid locate approximately 180 million miles ( 290 million klick ) from Earth . The probe will return to Earth with a valued asteroid sample in tardy 2020 , should all go concord to program .
Hayabusa2arrived at Ryugu in June , and everything has gone absolutely swimmingly since then , with the probe snapping some extremely cool characterization of thisweirdly shapedasteroid . Yesterday , however , mission planner receive the first bug in the mission , when the investigation balked during its first touchdown rehearsal .
3D visualization of asteroid Ryugu#Ryugu#リュウグウ#Hayabusa2#はやぶさ2#Asteroidpic.twitter.com / sSlNtq6qJS
— Roman Tkachenko ( @_RomanTkachenko)September 10 , 2018
Unfortunately , things did n’t go as design . On the third day of TD1 - R1 ( September 12 ) , the autonomous investigation dead stop its descent when it progress to a space of 2,000 feet ( 600 meter ) , and it began to climb back up .
JAXA is n’t indisputable why this happened , but it says the problem may have something to do with the ballistic capsule ’s laser altimeter , the LIDAR instrument , which measure out the distance between the investigation and the surface of the asteroid . JAXA says the asteroid ’s low reflectivity may have prevented the optical maser altimeter from working in good order ; Hayabusa2 automatically stopped its descent the moment it could no longer measure its distance to the asteroid .
Aside from this incident , everything else is likely fine , and Hayabusa2 is still performing commonly . The probe is presently returning to its home position in orbit around Ryugu . JAXA is now preparing for the second rehearsal , which — fingerbreadth crossed — will hopefully go much unspoilt . In preparation , the JAXA squad is working on a new descent function , which includes a reexamination of LIDAR and its options .
There ’s no need to panic yet , but if the second dry run does n’t go well , that would obviously not be a beneficial signal . This is a hugely ambitious missionary station with lots of moving parts , so reversal should be expect . What ’s more , a spry glance at Ryugu ’s aerofoil shows it ’s an unwelcoming place , one litter with all sort of nook and crannies and no shortage of sharp rock . Should the commission go well , and Hayabusa2 returns to Earth with its samples in 2020 , that would represent a fantastic acquisition , indeed .
Correction : A previous variant of this article gave the incorrect distance of Ryugu to Earth .
[ JAXA ]
asteroidsHayabusa2ScienceSpacecraft
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