Hayabusa2\u2019s sample return capsule has landed in Woomera, Australia, today, 5 December \u2014 or 6 December local time at Woomera. <\/b>The exact landing location is now being determined, but a tweet from the mission\u2019s official account says an estimated location of landing has been identified and teams are en route to recover it.<\/p>\n
The craft returned not just asteroid surface material, but subsurface material (at first) as well, and will be met by Japanese scientists after completing its six-year mission to the asteroid 162173 Ryugu.<\/p>\n
The main Hayabusa2 spacecraft meanwhile used its remaining propellant to start an extended, 11 year astronomical mission.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Spacecraft and mission profile<\/b><\/p>\n
Hayabusa2 is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) operated mission with a dry mass of 490 kg. It launched with four small rovers, an impactor, and five target markers on 3 December 2014 on an H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center and rendezvoused with the asteroid Ryugu on 27 June 2018.<\/p>\n
At Ryugu, Hayabusa2 collected samples, deployed a kinetic impactor, and tried to release four small rovers onto the asteroid\u2019s surface. <\/p>\n
The first two rovers, HIBOU and OWL, deployed successfully on 21 September 2018. A third, Rover-2, was successful on 3 October 2018; however, the fourth failed before it was released. Nonetheless, it was still used to gather gravitational information during an intentionally destructive release from Hayabusa2 on 2 October 2019 that resulted in the rover\u2019s crash onto Ryugu.<\/p>\n
Space tourism guides (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n Due to the low gravity on the asteroid, all three successful rovers were unable to use wheels. Instead they used a solar-powered motor to propel themselves across the surface via a series of hops, which served as a technology demonstrator for future low-gravity environments.<\/p>\n