Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Hayabusa-2 drops more tech on Ryugu


The Hayabusa-2 mission to asteroid Ryugu is going well so far.  It already released two little hopper rovers onto the cute little 'roid, and it just dropped a lander with a 16-hour battery lifetime onto the surface, too.

Japanese rover lands on ancient asteroid for 16 hour-mission

It's apparently a "rover" because it can move to three different locations during its brief scientific expedition.

After this, Hayabusa-2 will release one more rover, and then go down for the sample collection.  Once that's done, it sends the sample return capsule back to Earth.

Hopefully everything keeps working as well as it has so far.

By the way, if you've ever wondered what it would be like to stand on the surface of  comet (and don't think that the movie Armageddon was anywhere close), the European Space Agency released an image from the Rosetta mission of the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is in the article at the link below.

This is what it would be like to stand on the surface of a comet, according to the European Space Agency\

Now, I wonder, if you were standing right there, would you be able to jump into orbit?  It's not exactly a large heavy space object, as it's apparently more like a fluffy rockpile, probably not having a lot of mass.  The escape velocity is around 1 meter per second (2.2 miles per hour).  So how fast can you jump? 






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