ryugu Archives

News Dec. 8, 2020, 7:25 AM

Japan has completed its 3-billion-mile mission to collect dust from an asteroid. Photos show the prize falling into Australia like a fireball.

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 mission bombed an asteroid in order to scoop up rock and dust from below its surface. The spacecraft dropped the asteroid material into the Australian outback on Saturday. That made Japan the first nation to collect samples from below the surface of a space rock. NASA just collected […]

News Dec. 5, 2020, 7:55 AM

A Japanese spacecraft is about to send a ‘treasure box’ of asteroid dust plummeting to Earth. Watch the sample return live.

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft is set to deliver a sample of rock and dust from asteroid Ryugu to Earth on Saturday. Hayabusa-2 blasted the asteroid with a bullet in 2019. The “treasure box” it’s bringing back holds the world’s first sample from below the surface of an asteroid. Studying this space […]

Tech Sep. 24, 2018, 10:36 AM

Here are the first pictures from the rovers Japan just landed on an asteroid 280 million km away

Japan now has two rovers on an asteroid 280 million kilometres from Earth, and they’ve started sending back the first pictures of life on a very lonely rock. First, here’s a shot the Hayabusa2 spacecraft took back in June of asteroid 162173 Ryugu: Hayabusa2 began its journey on December 3, […]

Tech Jun. 27, 2018, 1:32 PM

Japan hopes to land a spacecraft on an asteroid — and has successfully begun orbiting it

A previous version of this story suggested the spacecraft would land on 162173 Ryugu immediately. Hayabusa2 will first orbit the asteroid for an unspecified time to find suitable landing and experimentation sites. Japan hopes to land a spacecraft on an asteroid 3.2 billion kilometres away, and it’s letting people on […]