Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe has successfully landed on a distant asteroid where it hopes to collect samples that could shed light on the evolution of the solar system.
Scientists in the control room observing the landing clapped and made “V” for victory signs.
The agency said the probe had been working normally above Ryugu asteroid, some 300m km (185m miles) from Earth.
Its landing is the second time the probe has touched down on the desolate asteroid as part of a complex mission that has also involved sending rovers and robots.
HAYABUSA2@JAXA
(@haya2e_jaxa)[PPTD] July 11 at 10:51 JST: Gate 5 check. The state of the spacecraft is normal and the touchdown sequence was performed as scheduled. Project Manager Tsuda has declared that the 2nd touchdown was a success!
The mission hopes to collect pristine materials from beneath the surface of the asteroid that could provide insights into what the solar system was like at its birth, some 4.6bn years ago.
To get at those crucial materials, in April an “impactor” was fired from Hayabusa2 towards Ryugu in a risky process that created a crater on the asteroid’s surface and stirred up material that had not previously been exposed to the atmosphere.
“This is the second touchdown, but doing a touchdown is a challenge whether it’s the first or the second,” Yuichi Tsuda, Hayabusa2 project manager, told reporters ahead of the mission.
“The whole team will do our best so that we’ll be able to complete the operation,” he said.
Hayabusa2’s first touchdown was in February, when it landed briefly on Ryugu and fired a bullet into the surface to puff up dust for collection, before blasting back to its holding position.
The second touchdown required special preparations because any problems could have meant the probe lost the precious materials already gathered during its first landing.
A photo of the crater taken by Hayabusa2’s camera showed that parts of the asteroid’s surface are covered with materials that are “obviously different” from the rest of the surface, mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa told reporters.
The probe is expected to make a brief touchdown on an area some 20 metres away from the centre of the crater to collect the unidentified materials believed to be “ejecta” from the blast.
“It would be safe to say that extremely attractive materials are near the crater,” Tsuda said.
The probe will return to Earth next year, when scientists hope to learn more about the history of the solar system and even the origin of life from its samples.
At about the size of a large refrigerator and equipped with solar panels to keep it powered, Hayabusa2 is the successor to JAXA’s first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa – Japanese for falcon.
That probe returned with dust samples from a smaller, potato-shaped asteroid in 2010, despite various setbacks during its epic seven-year odyssey and was hailed as a scienwratific triumph.
Hayabusa2’s photos of Ryugu, which means “Dragon Palace” in Japanese and refers to a castle at the bottom of the ocean in an ancient Japanese tale, show the asteroid has a rough surface full of boulders.
The Hayabusa2 mission was launched in December 2014, and has a price tag of around 30bn yen ($270m). But its has already made history, including with the creation of the crater on Ryugu’s surface.
In 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact project succeeded in creating an artificial crater on a comet but only for observation purposes.
