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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."

14 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.

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      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 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.

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      No sig today...
    6. 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.

  2. Re:Borg Cube by Joce640k · · Score: 2, Funny

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

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    No sig today...
  3. 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
  4. 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...

  5. 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.

  6. 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.)

  7. 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"