Expand / The Hayabusa2 spacecraft spies its shadow because it descended toward Ryugu to set up two little rovers.
Early on Sunday afternoon, the heavens over a lush military complex in central Australia is going to probably soon be brightened by a fireball plummeting to Earth. It’ll be a showy homecoming to its sample return capsule in Hayabusa2, a Western spacecraft found almost exactly six decades back to a mission to take an early asteroid and sneak a number of its own dirt. In case the cartridge conveys its fiery warrior, its own payload of pristine space stone will help scientists know that the earliest times of the solar system, shed light onto the mysterious roots of meteorites, and might even provide clues regarding the development of life on Earth.
From now it lands under parachute from the Australian outback, the sample could have traveled over 180 million kilometers in Ryugu, a diamond-shaped asteroid orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. Researchers consider who Ryugu broke away by a larger parent body just a couple million decades back, however, the stones that make up had been nearer to 4 million years of age. Hayabusa2 camped out about Ryugu for at least a year and a half an hour, analyzing the asteroid in a space and sending robotic scouts into its surface to get ready for a sample set. It’s primary mission was to amass only a couple g of dust and dander from the time capsule that’s been maintained for eons from the frigid vacuum of space.
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