The Japanese HAYABUSA-2 spacecraft is about to make history within the next hour as it swoops down on asteroid Ryugu to collect some samples of regolith (rocks and dirt), save it for eventual transport back to earth next year. Touchdown is expected shortly after 6:00 p.m. EST.
Hopefully, some of us will find this more exciting than following the daily trail of trump tweets, Roger Stone jokes or the flaming wars over Bernie Sanders.
The spacecraft has been descending slowly for the past several hours and is now within 200 meters of the surface.
The spacecraft has been in orbit around Ryugu since June of 2018 and had earlier deployed a few small hopping landers on the asteroid.
The spacecraft will approach the surface of the asteroid with a sampling horn. When the horn touches the surface, a projectile (5-gram tantalum bullet) will be fired at 300 m/s into the surface. The resulting ejecta particles will be collected by a catcher at the top of the horn.
There is live coverage; there are real-time images at www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/... but no live video, since the comm. data rate is quite low.
Here is the link for the live webcast.
Here is the timeline. Note that JST is 14 hours ahead of EST. Touchdown will be at 6:06 p.m. EST.
The spacecraft descent began a few hours ago.
The updates at the twitter site are getting more frequent.
Here is an animation of the mission including the regolith collection event -
Next Steps
There will be another collection around April, when HAYABUSA-2 will shoot a 2.5 kg copper projectile from a distance of 500 m using a 4.5 kg shaped charge of plasticized HMX, creating a 2 m diameter crater and exposing sub-surface material. Samples will be collected from within the crater after 2 weeks.
HAYABUSA-2 will head home in Dec 2019 and drop the samples and the enclosing capsule into Earth’s atmosphere in Dec 2020.
SpaceX Launch
Don’t forget about the upcoming SpaceX Falcon launch tonight around 8:45 p.m. EST. More info at www.dailykos.com/...
Epilogue
2019 is shaping up to be an exciting and productive year for the space program, with new satellite launches, crewed spacecraft from SpaceX and Boeing, progress by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, moon rovers and further inroads into the trip to the Moon and Mars.
Check out spaceflightnow.com/… for an up-to-date list of space launches planned this year.
And let’s keep working to elect Democrats into office, who will spend our tax dollars on Science, not walls.
Further Reading
- Main website — www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/…
- wiki — en.wikipedia.org/…
- OSIRIS-REx - Asteroid Sampler — www.dailykos.com/…
- Spacecraft Departures and Arrivals, Week of Feb 18, 2019 — www.dailykos.com/...