SCI Japanese space probe arrives at asteroid to collect samples

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Japanese space probe arrives at asteroid to collect samples

Associated Press
KEN MORITSUGU, Associated Press • June 27, 2018

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese space probe arrived at an asteroid Wednesday after a 3 1/2-year journey to undertake a first-ever experiment: blow a crater in the rocky surface to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.

The unmanned Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached its base of operations about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the asteroid and some 280 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said.

Over the next year and a half, the robotic explorer will attempt three brief touch-and-go landings to collect samples. If the retrieval and the return journey are successful, the asteroid material could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.

The mission is challenging. Hayabusa2 will spend about two months looking for suitable landing places on the uneven surface. Because of the high surface temperature, it will stay for only a few seconds each time it lands. Any samples would be sent back in a re-entry capsule that is due to arrive at the end of 2020.

The asteroid, named Ryugu after an undersea palace in a Japanese folktale, is about 900 meters (3,000 feet) in diameter. In photos released by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, it appears more cube-shaped than round. A number of large craters can be seen, which Project Manager Yuichi Tsuda said in an online post makes the selection of landing points "both interesting and difficult."

The first touchdown is planned for September or October. Before the final touchdown, scheduled for April or May, Hayabusa2 will send out a squat cylinder that will detonate above the asteroid, shooting a 2-kilogram (4.4-pound) copper projectile into it at high speed to make a crater.

Hayabusa2 will hide on the other side of the asteroid to protect itself during the operation and wait another two to three weeks to make sure any debris that could damage the explorer has cleared. It will then attempt to land at or near the crater to collect underground material that was blown out of the crater, in addition to the surface material from the earlier touchdowns.

The spacecraft will also deploy three rovers that don't have wheels but can hop around on the surface of the asteroid to conduct probes. Hayabusa2 will also send a French-German-made lander to study the surface with four observation devices.

Asteroids, which orbit the sun but are much smaller than planets, are among the oldest objects in the solar system. As such, they may help explain how Earth evolved, including the formation of oceans and the start of life.

Hayabusa2, launched in December 2014, is a successor to the 2003-2010 Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a different type of asteroid and took three years longer than planned after a series of technical glitches, including a fuel leak and a loss of contact for seven weeks.

NASA also has an ongoing asteroid mission. Its Osiris-Rex spacecraft is expected to reach the asteroid Bennu later this year and return with samples in 2023.

___

This story corrects the name of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

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https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/...-2022-2026-double-asteroid-missions-html.html

Asteroid day June 30 and NASA, ESA collaborating on 2022-2026 double asteroid missions

brian wang | June 27, 2018

The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA will each send a mission to the same binary asteroid to test if they can impact it alter its orbit.

In 2022, a NASA mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will collide with Didymoon when the system will come 11 million kilometers close to Earth. The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth.

The DART spacecraft will utilize the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster – Commercial (NEXT-C) solar electric propulsion system as its primary in-space propulsion system. NEXT-C is the next generation system that is based on the Dawn spacecraft propulsion system and was developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. By utilizing electric propulsion, DART is able to gain significant flexibility to the mission timeline and widen the launch window, as well as decrease the cost of the of the launch vehicle that gets the mission off Earth and into orbit.

In 2026, the ESA will sendHera spacecraft would reach Didymos in 2026, a few years after the double asteroid system is deflected by NASA DART spacecraft. Hera mission will create detailed maps of the surface and interior structure of binary system by using high-resolution visual, laser and radio technology.

The primary body Didymos is approximately 800 meters across, which is orbited by a 170 meters secondary body or moonlet called Didymoon. Hera will attempt to learn more about this system.

Tomorrow (June 28) the annual briefing on the State of Asteroid Science, Discovery and Planetary Defense will be presented by the Asteroid Foundation as part of Asteroid Day LIVE from Luxembourg.

Asteroid Day was co-founded in 2014, by Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, Danica Remy, B612 President, Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and filmmaker Grig Richters. Asteroid Day is held on 30 June each year to mark the date of Earth’s largest asteroid impact in recorded history, the Siberia Tunguska event, which devastated over 2,000 km2 of forest in 1908.

Video

In 2016, the United Nations declared Asteroid Day to be a global day of education to raise awareness about asteroids. Major sponsors of Asteroid Day include the Government of Luxembourg, B612 Foundation, Broadcasting Centre Europe (BCE), SES, and Tomorrow Street, a joint venture of Vodaphone and Technoport. Asteroid Day is a program of the Asteroid Foundation, a Luxembourg-based nonprofit organization

The National Air and Space Museum will host “Asteroid Day: Defending Planet Earth” June 30 at the museum in Washington, D.C.

* Jim Zimbelman, geologist in the museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, who will speak on the importance of impacts throughout the solar system.
* NASA astronaut Tom Jones will discuss the asteroid hazard from a scientist-astronaut’s perspective, and
* NASA scientists Lindley Johnson and Kelly Fast will speak about NASA’s planetary defense activities.
* The panel will be moderated by Cheryl Reed, who works on the asteroid deflection demonstration mission at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
 
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It must be a pretty large asteroid to have enough gravity to make a "hopping" rover not drift off into space.
 
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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47293317

Hayabusa-2: Japan spacecraft touches down on asteroid

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
22 February 2019
79 comments

A Japanese spacecraft has touched down on an asteroid in an attempt to collect a sample of rock from the surface.

The Hayabusa-2 probe was trying to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site on the asteroid Ryugu just before 23:00 GMT on 21 February.

The spacecraft reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.

Hayabusa-2 is expected to return to Earth in 2020 along with its rocky hoard.

During sample collection, the spacecraft approached the 1km-wide asteroid with an instrument called the sampler horn. On touchdown, a 5g "bullet" made of the metal tantalum was fired into the rocky surface at 300m/s.

The particles kicked up by the impact should have been be caught by the sampler horn.

"We made a successful touchdown, including firing a bullet," said Hayabusa-2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda.

"We made the ideal touchdown in the best conditions," he said.

The spacecraft began descending from its "home position" of 20km above the asteroid's surface in the early hours of 21 February (GMT) - several hours later than planned.

Japan sets date for asteroid 'rock grab'
Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type. The near-Earth asteroid (NEA) is a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System.

Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen's University Belfast, told BBC News: "We think we understand how carbon-rich asteroids migrate from the asteroid belt to become near-Earth asteroids, but the samples from Ryugu will allow its history to be explored.

"After the Rosetta mission, it's now clear that most of Earth's water did not come from comets in the early days of the Solar System. We believe carbon-rich (C-type) asteroids may have significant amounts of water locked up in their rocks. It's possible such asteroids may have brought to Earth both the water and the organic material necessary for life to start.

"These samples will be crucial in investigating this possibility."

science-environment-47293317
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/485/socialembed/https://twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa/status/1098734329000353792~/news/science-environment-47293317

Hayabusa-2 had earlier dropped a small, reflective, beanbag-like "target marker" on to Ryugu. This was used as a guide as the spacecraft descended to the rough surface of the asteroid.

Controllers were aiming for the centre of a circle, some 6m in diameter, located about 4-5m away from the target marker.

The Japanese space agency (Jaxa) had originally planned to carry out the touchdown operation in October last year. But the asteroid's surface was found to be much more rugged than expected, with numerous, hefty boulders making it hard to find a location that was large and flat enough to sample.

Controllers had hoped they would have an area of about 100m in diameter to target. But because of the surface properties, this had to be reduced to a 6m circle for what team members are calling a "pinpoint touchdown".

The sampler horn that extends out from the bottom of the spacecraft has a length of 1m. It's therefore vital that there are no boulders more than 50cm in height at the landing site, to reduce the chances that the body of the spacecraft could hit a rock.

Unexpected surface properties also have the potential to affect the amount of material collected. Before arriving at Ryugu, researchers had expected the surface to be covered in a powdery layer of fine-grained material - the regolith.

In fact, the upper layer turned out to be akin to gravel, consisting of rocky chunks that are centimetre-sized or larger.

Prof Fitzsimmons told BBC News: "This was a surprise, as other near-Earth asteroids we have visited previously have shown areas dominated by small particles.

"It might be due to the carbon-rich composition, as the previous NEAs are composed of silicate rock, which are more Earth-like. But the shape of Ryugu also implies it was spinning much faster in the past, so it's possible this could have affected the particles' sizes in some fashion."

Scientists carried out additional tests in Japan to determine whether the sample material could still be gathered by the spacecraft.

They used a container of artificial gravel with a similar size distribution to that on Ryugu. In a vacuum chamber, they fired a tantalum bullet identical to that used by Hayabusa-2 into the gravel.

science-environment-47293317

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/485/s...7243107328~/news/science-environment-47293317

According to Jaxa, the results of the test exceeded expectations, with the tantalum projectile yielding fragments of rock in size ranges that should easily pass through the sampler horn.

This suggests that Hayabusa-2 should have been able to collect a sample.

In September, Hayabusa-2 deployed two robotic "hoppers" that propelled themselves across the surface of Ryugu, sending back images and other data.

Then, in October, the "mothership" despatched a French-German instrument package called Mascot to the surface.

Later this year, perhaps in March or April, Jaxa plans to detonate an explosive charge that will punch a crater into the surface of Ryugu.

Hayabusa-2 would then descend into the crater to collect fresh samples of material that have not been altered by aeons of exposure to space.

"We know that the surfaces of asteroids are changed over time by bombardment with energetic particles from the Sun and interstellar space," said Alan Fitzsimmons.

"Yet studies with telescopes show that this 'space weathering' affects the surfaces of carbon-rich asteroids differently to those mostly made from more rock-like silicate minerals. We don't know why this is, and the fresh sub-surface samples from Ruygu will play a very important role in understanding how this happens."

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tanstaafl

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For what it's worth, Hayabusa-2 isn't the only spacecraft right now attempting to bring asteroid samples back to Earth. The US spacecraft OSIRIS-REx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx) went into orbit around Asteroid Bennu on 12/31/2018, and the plan is to collect a sample and return it to Earth in September 2023.
 
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www.cnet.com

Japan's asteroid sample returns home, poised to reveal solar system's secrets

Hayabusa2 delivers ancient samples to Earth, ending a historic, six-year mission to asteroid Ryugu.
www.cnet.com www.cnet.com

Japan's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample makes perfect landing in Australia's outback
A blazing reentry fireball brings to a close a six-year mission to asteroid Ryugu.

Jackson Ryan


Dec. 5, 2020 12:21 p.m. PT


Listen
- 06:52







It surprised, dazzled, then disappeared in a flash. In the early hours of Sunday morning, local time, the sample capsule of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft plowed through the atmosphere over the Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, blazing an ephemeral trail of fire through the sky.

Above the Lookout Cave Motel in the center of town, just before 4 a.m. local time (9:30 p.m. PT), about a dozen people gathered and mingled. Tripods were erected and camera equipment was fine-tuned and pointed at the sky. Then, without a sound, a twinkling point of light appeared out of the dark. It moved quickly. The crowd erupted with "oohs" and some pointed their phones at the sky.
Among those wowed by the show were 34-year-old Ross, from Townsville, and his two sons, 6-year-old Max and 8-year-old Chase. "It was pretty cool," Ross said. "It was worth getting up early for."
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Locked within the capsule is the first ever subsurface sample from an asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed that the 16-inch container had touched down on the flat, ochre plains of the Woomera Prohibited Area more than 200 miles southeast of Coober Pedy at approximately 4:37 a.m. local time (10:07 a.m. PT, Saturday).

The landing is the culmination of a decade of work by JAXA scientists and engineers, and it comes six years after Hayabusa2, which is about the size of a washing machine, departed Earth. The spacecraft travelled over 3.2 billion miles on its journey to near-Earth asteroid Ryugu and back, spending over a year using specialized cameras, radar and an infrared imager to survey the spinning top-shaped rock. On two occasions in 2019, it collected samples from the surface in brief snatch-and-go maneuvers.

Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director of JAXA's Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), says the mission has been one of the defining moments of his life, As it came to a close, it was obvious the stunning finale and recovery operations would be bittersweet.

"This is the last time we will all be together," Fujimoto said.

There's still some work to do yet, starting with ensuring the contents of the capsule are safe. The recovery mission took place in the predawn dark of the outback and confirmation of the capsule's collection is still pending.

Outback adventure
The Australian Space Agency and the Department of Defense (DOD) played a significant role in the capsule's safe return. The DOD manages the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA), a huge swathe of land, about half the size of the United Kingdom, where the capsule was guided after release from Hayabusa2 on Saturday. Road closures kept residents from passing through the region for almost 12 hours, as a precautionary measure.

JAXA engineers tightened the final landing zone to an area about one-tenth that size, with some deft maneuvering while the spacecraft was traveling back to Earth.

The sample entered the Earth's atmosphere moving at about 7.5 miles per second, but as it hit the dense atmosphere it slowed down to around 110 yards per second, throwing off its heat shield and deploying its parachute. After gliding for about 20 minutes, it landed on the red, Mars-like plains of the WPA.


Michelle Xu Ke, who watched from Williams Creek Road sent me this: look at this dazzling tail from #Hayabusa2 !!! This is so cool, and just from a camera phone. pic.twitter.com/L6ghHdGw2h
— jack ryan (@dctrjack) December 5, 2020
Click to expand...

To help locate the sample capsule, members of the Defence Force locked on to it as it first began burning through the atmosphere, tracking it with ground cameras and radar. This enabled the JAXA team to locate the sample and send its helicopter team to fly out and collect it at approximately 4:47 a.m., local. The very first person who had the honor of touching the capsule was a safety officer, says Satoru Nakazawa, who led the recovery mission.

Once it acquired the capsule, the recovery team quickly ferried it to a pop-up laboratory within the Woomera Range Operations Center, known as the Quick Look Facility or QLF.

What's in the box?
The team predicts that Hayabusa2 collected about one gram of material from Ryugu, based on observations from the spacecraft's cameras. Confirmation of exactly what was nabbed during Hayabusa2's two heists is expected over the coming weeks.

JAXA's specialist retrieval team located the capsule at approximately 5:34 a.m. local time and took it back to the QLF for testing. According to JAXA's Hayabusa2 Twitter account, all operations ended at 6:01 a.m. local (11:31 a.m. PT). "The operation was perfect," the tweet read.

Hajime Yano, a scientist with ISAS, says the sample capsule won't be opened until it's returned to the ISAS facility in Japan. However, a device that can measure small amounts of gas in a sample was erected within the QLF to make the first analysis of the capsule.

The facility includes a clean room, and staff must be dressed head-to-toe in protective gear -- not because of concern over some long-dormant alien asteroid disease or even COVID-19, but to protect the sample from any contamination. After the return, Yano and his team punctured the bottom of the capsule to detect any residual gas. A preliminary analysis will enable researchers to tell whether Hayabusa2 was successful in snatching pieces of rock and debris from the surface of Ryugu.

Fujimoto says the capsule will be pried open in Japan sometime "around December 20th." The contents of the capsule are expected to improve our understanding of the early solar system and the Earth.

Previous observations of Ryugu by Hayabusa2 have suggested there are traces of water-bearing minerals within the asteroid. Some scientists believe this may have been how water was brought to Earth's surface and potentially, how organic material rained down on the early planet and kick-started life.

Return to Woomera
Many JAXA team members will now turn their attention to Phobos and Deimos, two moons of Mars. The Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to launch in 2024 and would likely return a sample obtained from Phobos' surface by 2029.

The mission will feature partnerships with NASA, the French Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA). It's also likely to feature another key partner: Australia. Though not officially confirmed, Fujimoto has hinted those samples would also touch down in the outback.

"With my experience this time, I'm really inclined towards having Woomera as a landing spot," he said. "We want to continue to collaborate."

Fujimoto says the interests of JAXA and the interests of the Australian Space Agency are closely aligned. Megan Clark, head of the Australian Space Agency, is enthusiastic about keeping the relationship between Japan and Australia going, allowing the nation's fledgling agency to continue to grow.

"International partnerships are pivotal for us," she said. "We cannot transform our own space industry and grow the jobs here without the depth of international partnerships."

Hayabusa2's sample return mission is over, but the spacecraft hasn't been retired. JAXA engineers and scientists will steer the probe to another two asteroids over the next decade. And there may be another Hayabusa mission in the works, too. JAXA personnel have dropped tantalizing hints that the duology could become a trilogy in the future. Will we see a Hayabusa3? That's a distinct possibility.

A press conference detailing the sample recovery operation is scheduled for 11 p.m. PT on Saturday, featuring Megan Clark, Fujimoto and other representatives from JAXA. You can find the stream below.
 
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Hayabusa 2 has brought back gases from an asteroid for the first time​


Gases brought back from the asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft are revealing the asteroid’s history and may help us reconstruct the evolution of the solar system
20 October 2022
By Leah Crane


View of asteroid Ryugu from Hayabusa 2. Credits: JAXA, University of Tokyo & collaborators

View of the asteroid Ryugu from the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft
JAXA, University of Tokyo & collaborators

For the first time, researchers are working on analysing pristine gases from an asteroid. These gases were brought back in rock samples collected by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, which visited the asteroid Ryugu from 2018 through 2019, and they are giving us hints about how and where the asteroid – and other objects in the solar system – formed.
Ryugu was most likely formed toward the edges of our solar system before the migration of the giant planets flung it towards Earth. A new analysis of the iron in the samples shows that it may have come from even further out than researchers realised, near Uranus and Neptune, so these samples may help illuminate the history of the outer solar system.

“Essentially all of our knowledge of how we think the solar system formed and what this outer solar system material looks like is based on meteorites, but those have the disadvantage that they fell to Earth and were contaminated by air and weather and people,” says Henner Busemann at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, part of the research team that analysed the Hayabusa 2 samples. “In this case we know exactly where the sample came from, and it never touched the ground or saw rain.”

That means that we can use these samples to understand the asteroid and outer solar system in more detail. One of the ways researchers did that was by examining the gases that shook loose from the rock samples, but remained in the airtight sample containers, as they jostled their way back to Earth and determining how those gases got to Ryugu.
Because some of these gases got there directly from space radiation, this allowed the researchers to measure the age of the asteroid’s surface. “If you would walk on the asteroid, you would be exposed to all of these cosmic rays and the solar wind, and you would die of cancer very soon,” says Busemann. “The rocks, of course, do not die, but they undergo nuclear reactions that can tell us how long the rock has been exposed.”

While Ryugu itself – or at least the parent body that it broke off of long ago – is expected to be about 4.5 billion years old, the rocks in the sample were only at the surface for about 5 million years. That age is consistent with the amount of surface turnover seen in asteroids near Earth, not in the outer solar system, so Ryugu must have migrated inward from its birthplace at least millions of years ago.

Journal references: Science Advances, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.add8141, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abo7239; Science, DOI:doi/10.1126/science.abo0431

www.newscientist.com

Hayabusa 2 has brought back gases from an asteroid for the first time

Gases brought back from the asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft are revealing the asteroid’s history and may help us reconstruct the evolution of the solar system
www.newscientist.com www.newscientist.com
 
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tanstaafl

Has No Life - Lives on TB
The Fukushima lab techs confidently say nothing in the samples has changed any tech's glow-in-the-dark light level readings! :)
 
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