Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2018

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018 T his image of the asteroid Ryugu was captured by the Optical Nav- igation Camera – Telescopic (ONC-T) on JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018, from a distance of 13.7 miles (22 km). [JAXA / University of Tokyo / Kochi University / Rikkyo University / Nagoya University / Chiba Institute of Technology / Meiji University / Aizu University / AIST] that of the fisherman: reaching the target, knowing the environment, and coming back with something precious. Hayabusa2 is the improved version of a previous mis- sion called Hayabusa (“falcon peregrine” in Japanese), which, between September and November 2005, studied the asteroid Ito- kawa, also a near-Earth asteroid (NEA), also discovered by LINEAR, and also named after the launch of the probe. Hayabusa landed on Itokawa and took samples of the surface that a special vehicle brought back to Earth in 2010, overcoming a series of obstacles. Hayabusa2 has the same basic final goal, but the operations to be performed on Ryugu are much more ambitious and complex. Let’s take a brief look at how the probe is structured and what the expected tasks for