“Hayabusa 2” Last observation next month To drop a small exploration robot September 24, 15:11
JAXA = Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced that it will drop the last small robot as a series of observations on next month 3 .
The Japanese spacecraft “Hayabusa 2” continues to be observed after two successful landings on the asteroid “Ryugu”, about 300 million kilometers away from the Earth.
JAXA held a press conference and announced that a small exploration robot developed by groups such as Tohoku University and Yamagata University and installed in Hayabusa2 will be dropped on Ryugu next month. .
The exploration robot is a small one with a length of about 15 cm and a weight of about 900 grams, and it was planned to move with a camera by jumping over the surface of the asteroid, but there was an unknown cause that the equipment did not move Therefore, it was decided to change the plan, take a picture of the dropped robot with Hayabusa2 and observe the gravity of "Ryugu".
With this, the series of observations will be the last, and after that, we are going to enter into full-scale preparations for operation to return to Earth starting from November to December.
“We would like to start preparing for the return to the earth after doing the best operations possible in the current situation when there are troubles with robots,” said Takashi Kubota, the principal investigator of JAXA.