Japan’s space agency has just completed the latest stage of its extraordinarily complex mission, successfully landing its Hayabusa2 spacecraft on an asteroid millions of miles from Earth. It’s now attempting to collect samples from the space rock that it hopes to bring to Earth for scientific analysis in 2020.
The fact that most drivers occasionally have trouble maneuvering a car into a tight space makes it all the more remarkable that the very same species has just parked a satellite onto a small boulder-strewn asteroid hurtling through the universe millions of miles from Earth.
The astonishing feat was achieved by Japan’s space agency (JAXA) at about 3 p.m. PT on February 21 when it landed Hayabusa2 on the asteroid Ryugu.
The successful touchdown on the 900-meter-wide space rock was met with enthusiastic applause at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center near Tokyo, and allowed the team to proceed to the next stage of the highly complex mission, which should ultimately see a sample from the space rock returned to Earth.
