Hayabusa-2 Returns Samples of Asteroid Ryugu to Earth

On December 6, 2020, JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft delivered a landing capsule with samples of material collected from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid (162173) Ryugu to the outback desert of Woomera in South Australia.

Ryugu, also known as 1999 JU3, is a primitive carbonaceous asteroid that contains hydrated minerals and organic molecules. Its name refers to Ryūgū (Dragon Palace), a magical underwater palace in a Japanese folktale.

This asteroid was discovered in May 1999 by astronomers with the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research.

It measures approximately 900 m (0.56 miles) in diameter and orbits the Sun at a distance of 0.96-1.41 AU once every 474 days.

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. Image credit: JAXA.

Hayabusa-2’s container with material from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu and its parachute in South Australia.

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Image credit: German Aerospace Center / CC-BY 3.0.

This illustration depicts JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft at the asteroid Ryugu.

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Image credit: JAXA / University of Tokyo / Kochi University / Rikkyo University / Nagoya University / Chiba Institute of Technology / Meiji University / Aizu University / AIST.

his image of the asteroid Ryugu was captured by the Optical Navigation Camera – Telescopic (ONC-T) on JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018, from a distance of 13.7 miles (22 km).

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JAXA’s Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2” capsule re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and successfully landed in Australia on 5 December 2020. The samples collected from asteroid Ryugu have been recovered by JAXA.
Credit: JAXA

JAXA’s Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2” performed a second touchdown to collect a sample from asteroid Ryugu on 11 July 2019.

The video was created from images captured with Hayabusa2’s CAM-H at intervals between 0.5s and 5s and played back at 10x speed.

The first image was taken at an altitude of about 8.5m and the last is from an altitude of about 150m.