With a Rain of Robots, the Asteroid-Exploration Era Has Truly Begun

[Judi Lynn]

By Corey S. Powell | October 3, 2018 3:42 pm



The MASCOT lander captured this shot of asteroid Ryugu from an altitude of 20 meters (60 feet), just before touching down. More images and data will arrive in the next few days. (Credit: MASCOT/DLR/JAXA)

The MASCOT has landed.

As of two weeks ago, humans had never put a single robotic explorer on an asteroid. Now we have three of them hopping about on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide object currently orbiting on the other side of the Sun. On September 20, Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe dropped two little landers, MINERVA II-1a and II-1b. They promptly sent back dizzying images from the surface. Then last night (October 3), the mothership deployed MASCOT, a much larger rover that is now performing a battery of studies during its rushed, 16-hour lifespan. A fourth rover and sample collection are yet to come.

What we are witnessing here is not just a single spectacular mission (though Hayabusa2 certainly is), but the beginning of a new era of solar system exploration. When the New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015, that marked the end of humanity’s initial reconnaissance of the nine classical planets and the beginning of a closer look at the little-explored small objects that hold so much information about the formation and evolution of the solar system, and perhaps about the emergence of life on Earth.

In 2016, the Rosetta probe made spectacular studies of Comet 67P. Later this year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe will visit another near-Earth asteroid named Bennu; other NASA missions to a double asteroid, a metal asteroid, and asteroids caught in Jupiter’s orbit are all on the way. But for now, the story belongs to Haybusa2 and the spectacular work of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). I tracked down a few of the key players to get their firsthand impressions of this historic moment.

I asked Makoto Yoshikawa, mission manager of Hayabusa2 at JAXA, about his reaction to the first results from Hayabusa2 and its two little MINERVA-II rovers (it stands for MIcro-Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for the Asteroid, in case you were wondering). These innovative robots, each just 18 centimeters (7 inches) wide, use a movable internal weight to jump about on Ryugu. The gravity there is so weak that wheels or legs would be useless. Yoshikawa also previewed the next stages of the mission, when Hayabusa2 will lower itself to the surface of Ryugu and collect samples to send back to Earth.

More:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2018/10/03/asteroid-era-has-begun/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20DiscoverBlogs%20%28Discover%20Blogs%29#.W7Vy1mhKjIU