Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Spacecraft Hayabusa2 Returns Photos of Asteroid Prior To Contact (syfy.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the closer-look dept.

New submitter FranklinWebber writes: Spacecraft Hayabusa2 is approaching its target, asteroid Ryugu, after a three-and-a-half year trip. The Japan Aerospace Exporation Agency (JAXA) has released photos of the asteroid taken from a distance of several hundred kilometers and showing a diamond-shaped object.

Like its predecessor spacecraft a decade ago, Hayabusa2 is designed to collect samples from an asteroid and return them to earth. JAXA explains: "A C-type asteroid, which is a target of Hayabusa2, is a more primordial body than Itokawa [the target of Hayabusa and an S-type], and is considered to contain more organic or hydrated minerals.... we expect to clarify the origin of life by analyzing [samples from Ryugu]."

The Bad Astronomy blog has more discussion of the mission: "The spacecraft will deploy an impactor that will slam a 2.5 kilo piece of copper into the surface at 2 km/sec. This will dig down into the asteroid, revealing material underneath, which can then be analyzed to understand Ryugu's interior."

26 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Pixel peepers by pablo_max · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know that it is actually a pretty impressive feat to fly out there and take a photo of a small body object, but still... every time I see these photos that looks about as high rez as an original Nintento rendering, I can't help but think...Meh, is that really the best we can do?

    1. Re:Pixel peepers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hayabusa2's diameter is roughly 800m and these photos were taken around the 300km mark. That's like taking a photo of a human being from 7km away, but in space...after the mechanical stress of a rocket launch, 3 years of high temperature extremes and radiation, in ridiculously low light levels and on hardware that has to be as close to 100% reliable as you can make it. Hats off to the team, that's pretty damn impressive in my book.

    2. Re:Pixel peepers by pahles · · Score: 2

      Keep in mind these are not your typical cameras. Most probably the images were taken by a Near Infrared Spectrometer or a Thermal Infrared Imager.

      --
      Sig?
    3. Re:Pixel peepers by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      They are still hundreds of kilometres away. Their really good cameras are set up for closer range work. These are just the first images that are more than a spec and which give an indication that they are on course and the object is what they were expecting.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:Pixel peepers by necro81 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here is a recent YouTube video from space enthusiast and Kerbal guru Scott Manley. It attempts to explain the differences in capturing images of distant objects using spacecraft compared to, say, taking pictures with a smartphone. The most important aspect to keep in mind that is these images are taken from really far away, and so the objects being resolved are really tiny (i.e., subtend a tiny angle in the field of view).

      Let's throw some math at this. The target asteroid is roughly 0.9 km across, and was imaged from 320 to 240 km away. Even at the closest of four images, the asteroid was only 0.2 degrees (13 arcmin) across - less than half the apparent size of the full moon from here on Earth. Now, if Hayabusa2 was not going to get much closer, the designers of the spacecraft could have spec'ed a camera system with a narrower field of view, i.e., a greater magnification, so that it could resolve the asteroid better from that distance. But this spacecraft is going to get very, very close to the asteroid (probably land on it), and a camera with a narrow field of view would be a hindrance to good science when the spacecraft gets close up. Put differently: you wouldn't want to use a telescope to take a portrait of your friend.

      The designers had to make tradeoffs. The main camera has a field of view of about 6 degrees. On the bright side, things only get better from here as the spacecraft gets closer. It will spend the majority of its mission just 20 km away.

    5. Re:Pixel peepers by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      Couldn't they also just slap a smartphone camera on their satellite as well? It only weighs a fraction of an ounce.

    6. Re:Pixel peepers by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hayabusa2's diameter is roughly 800m and these photos were taken around the 300km mark. That's like taking a photo of a human being from 7km away, but in space...after the mechanical stress of a rocket launch, 3 years of high temperature extremes and radiation, in ridiculously low light levels and on hardware that has to be as close to 100% reliable as you can make it. Hats off to the team, that's pretty damn impressive in my book.

      There's also the fact that it was taken using the "navigation camera", not the "pretty-photo-taking camera".

      This camera has just enough resolution to make sure it's going in the right direction.

      --
      No sig today...
    7. Re:Pixel peepers by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

      The images are still crucially important. Sample return is the most difficult task for an automated spacecraft to accomplish successfully because there is such a long succession of things that can go wrong. For an asteroid sample return mission, closeup imaging of the target is a reasonable second best.

      NASA is still smarting over the solar particle return mission that, after years exposing a set of glass collector panels to the solar wind while in orbit, carefully folded up its panels and returned to Earth at a precisely selected spot in Utah, where recovery planes were waiting to catch it uncontaminated before it reached the ground. But because someone had installed the atmospheric deceleration sensors backwards, the parachutes didn't open and the mission just smashed into the ground.

    8. Re:Pixel peepers by CryptoBear · · Score: 1

      But because someone had installed the atmospheric deceleration sensors backwards, the parachutes didn't open and the mission just smashed into the ground.

      Imagine finding out that you were the one that put them in backwards. You'd have an entire omelette on your face.

    9. Re:Pixel peepers by BoogieChile · · Score: 1

      The camera is not a high-res imaging type, it's a navigation tool, only 1024x1024 pixels. The asteroid looks to be about 32 pixels across in these images

  2. Another Death Star by Gabest · · Score: 1

    This time it is square.

    1. Re:Another Death Star by JD-1027 · · Score: 2

      This is probably just the next Death Star from Episode 9. There is no way they are going to produce two episodes in a row with no death star.

    2. Re:Another Death Star by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Fans will cry out in anguish: That's no death star, that's just a moon!

  3. For Great Honor by mentil · · Score: 1

    Hmm... the Hayabusa2 spacecraft is rendezvousing with the Ryugu asteroid? I wonder if someone at JAXA was a fan of Ninja Gaiden

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  4. That's no moon... by maroberts · · Score: 1

    Some giant D&D player has lost a dice!

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

    1. Re:That's no moon... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Grammar Nazi...

      I hope you choke on one and die....

      (sarc: never off)

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  5. Re:Borg Cube by Joce640k · · Score: 2, Funny

    The real question is: "Is there anything in Japan which isn't named 'Hayabusa'?"

    --
    No sig today...
  6. Re:Borg Cube by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hayabusa is a type of falcon, so naturally it was used as the name of a number of products and projects over the years. I wouldn't say it's that popular though... Maybe Hikari is even more common. It means "light" so gets used for all sorts of things to do with illumination, fibre optic internet, high speed transport and is even a not too uncommon girl's name.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  7. Re:Even worse: Usefulness of showing it to us. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "but what is the point of showing us yet another gray rock?"

    Nothing.

    But that's not the mission objective. This spacecraft will blow a fresh crater in the surface of the asteroid, land on the asteroid, and collect freshly exposed material from the crater, and return it to Earth.

    It even has a mini rover on board that it will deploy.

    This is actually a really impressive mission, and makes Rosetta look pretty lame in comparison.

    The photos are irrelevant.

  8. Re:Borg Cube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    >Hayabusa is a type of falcon

    That's funny because of how many other rockets are named falcon. Just from spacex, falcon 9, falcon heavy, bfr/big falcon rocket...

  9. Why speed is important? by abies · · Score: 2

    Why does it matter that impactor is flying with 2km/s? From what I understand, impact depth should be mostly independent of speed above certain threshold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth)?

    1. Re:Why speed is important? by Convector · · Score: 2

      I think that's for momentum scaling. But impact craters generally scale with energy. A portion of the projectile's energy is transferred to the target and excavates a crater (O'Keefe and Ahrens, 1977). So the excavated crater scaling is really somewhere between momentum and energy. The pi-scaling relation's give a weak dependence of crater diameter on energy D ~ KE^0.22 (Melosh, 1989), or D ~ v^0.44. I believe depth-to-diameter ratio is more or less constant (Nagel and Fechtig, 1980), at least for simple craters. So you'd get a similar scaling for depth on velocity. Of course, 2 km/s is hardly even hypervelocity, so this scaling might not even apply yet.

      (I know, these are some pretty ancient references.)

  10. Re:Borg Cube by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    True enough! I hadn't spotted that one.

    --
    No sig today...
  11. Re:Borg Cube by hackertourist · · Score: 3, Funny

    To borrow a /. comment from the Hayabusa 1 mission, "That's one fast motorcycle, and one hell of a ramp"

  12. Does Hayabusa roll a saving throw? by whitroth · · Score: 1

    Or does it get 1 d-4 of damage from the asteroid?

  13. I'm not saying it's.... by spaceman375 · · Score: 1

    Square, possibly cubical? I know it's unlikely, but if this thing looks artificial I sure hope they can stop the impactor from firing.

    --
    On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth