Hayabusa2 Releases Robotic Explorers toward Asteroid Ryugu

September 21, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft delivered two small robotic explorers toward its target, the asteroid Ryugu, Friday afternoon Japan time, the country's space agency said.

After landing on the asteroid, the Minerva-II 1 explorers will attempt to take photos of its surface in several places to send the data to Hayabusa2, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said.

The explorers will make repeated jumps with motors to move on the surface of the asteroid with one-80,000th of the Earth's gravity.

If successful, it will be the world's first observation of the surface of an asteroid by a moving rover.

In 2005, an earlier version of the Minerva series explorer released from JAXA's original Hayabusa spacecraft failed to land on the asteroid Itokawa due to a problem in the timing of the release.

Hayabusa2 released the Minerva-II 1 explorers toward a location north of the asteroid's equator shortly past 1 p.m. (4 a.m. GMT) when it reached a point some 50-60 meters above Ryugu. The spacecraft started descending from a height of 20 kilometers on Thursday.

The explorers, developed by institutes such as JAXA and the University of Aizu, are 18 centimeters in diameter and 7 centimeters in height. They weigh about one kilogram each.

Hayabusa2 is scheduled to drop the MASCOT observation lander, made by German and French organizations, onto Ryugu on Oct. 3.

The spacecraft plans to release the Minerva-II 2 explorer, developed by institutes such as Tohoku University, next year. Hayabusa2 itself is scheduled to try to land on Ryugu in late October. Jiji Press