A team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute has come across new evidence of a large, previously unknown asteroid that once prowled our solar system. The discovery was made when studying a fragment of a 9-ton asteroid that exploded over Sudan in 2008.
JAXA recovered its Hayabusa 2 mission return capsule on December 5, and today they were able to confirm they did recover samples from the asteroid Ryugu.
Six years ago, on December 3, 2014, Japan launched Hayabusa 2 into space to begin its three-year-long journey to an asteroid named “Ryugu.” Once the asteroid was reached, samples were taken and sent back towards Earth. Now, finally, those samples have successfully arrived.
On December 3, 2014, Hayabusa 2 launched from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima, Japan, on a six-year-long journey. The mission was to study and collect samples from the asteroid named “Ryugu” before returning to Earth. That return date is a mere four days from today.
NASA is planning to embark a spacecraft on a 12-year journey starting next year on a first-of-its-kind mission called Lucy. The Lucy spacecraft will flyby and study distant asteroids in our Solar System as part of a mission to learn more about the origins of our planet and species.
The space agency shared a status update on the upcoming Lucy mission today as the mission team passed a major milestone that puts the launch on schedule for a launch in October 2021.
NASA is progressing toward an upcoming mission dedicated to exploring a unique asteroid called Psyche. The metal-rock asteroid orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter and could give us answers on how Earth was formed. The spacecraft that will be used for NASA’s Psyche mission is graduating from a design phase to manufacturing ahead of a planned launch in 2022.
