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Sep. 19, 2021
Hayabusa is Japanese for Peregrine Falcon. This is the mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to deliver soil samples from asteroids to Earth. The Hayabusa-1 spacecraft successfully delivered a capsule with the soil of the asteroid Itokawa (class S) in 2010. These were the first asteroid soil samples ever collected from space. The purpose of the Hayabusa-2 mission is the delivery of soil samples of a class C asteroid. A typical near-Earth asteroid from the Apollo group - Ryugu (162173 Ryugu) was chosen as an object.
The asteroid was discovered in 1999 by a group of astronomers at the Socorro Observatory. In 2015, the asteroid was officially named Ryugu. The name is taken from a Japanese fairy tale about a fisherman who visited the magical underwater castle-palace Ryugu-jo - the residence of the ruler of the sea. Hayabusa-2 was launched on December 3, 2014 from the Tanegashima cosmodrome. On September 21, 2018, the robotic modules successfully landed on the surface of the asteroid.
Probe studies on the asteroid have shown that Ryugu's surface is very young, estimated to be about 9 million years old. With an average diameter of 920 meters, 77 craters and 4400 large boulders were found on it. The largest boulder has a size of 160 × 120 × 70 meters and is too large for its origin to be explained by an ejection from a meteorite crater. The asteroid was likely formed as a result of the decay of a larger object. The surface of Ryugu is porous with low density. This is probably why most of the C-class asteroids burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
After returning the capsule, the amount of material recovered was 5.4 grams, which is 50 times more than expected. The samples have been distributed to several international laboratories and are currently being investigated.
Source: Moscow Planetarium.
Related links:
ROSCOSMOS Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/32602/
Moscow Planetarium: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/moskovskiy-planetariy/
Asteroid: https://www.roscosmos.ru/tag/asteroid/
Images, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/Moscow Planetarium/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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