Japan’s new asteroid probe reaches its target after 3.2-billion-kilometer journey
Preliminary observations “are really thrilling,” says Seiichiro Watanabe,
a project scientist at Nagoya University in Japan. The diamond-shape asteroid
is about 900 meters across and rotates around its own axis every 7.5 hours or so, more slowly than other similarly sized asteroids for reasons that are not yet clear, Watanabe says. The surface is strewn with boulders larger than would be expected to have accumulated on an asteroid of its size, something that has triggered a debate among planetary scientists. One line of thinking is that Ryugu was originally part of a larger asteroid that broke up. But others contend the boulders could have landed over time or might have been hard masses incorporated into the asteroid at its formation and later exposed as softer material eroded away. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” Watanabe says.
This is the second ISAS mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid. The original Hayabusa, launched in 2003 to explore an asteroid named Itokawa, “has been a stunning success,” planetary scientist Erik Asphaug at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote in a commentary in Sciencein June 2006, despite engine failures, a daunting variety of mechanical malfunctions, fuel and solar power losses, and communications blackouts during a 7-year, 6-billion-kilometer odyssey. The return sample capsule, which landed in the Australian outback in June 2010, carried 1500 particles of asteroid dust, despite glitches with the sample collection mechanism. And even before Hayabusa touched down on Itokawa, it had returned enough data for scientists to publish a clutch of papers in Science, including one concluding that the asteroid was a loose agglomeration of rubble rather than a solid rock.
a project scientist at Nagoya University in Japan. The diamond-shape asteroid
is about 900 meters across and rotates around its own axis every 7.5 hours or so, more slowly than other similarly sized asteroids for reasons that are not yet clear, Watanabe says. The surface is strewn with boulders larger than would be expected to have accumulated on an asteroid of its size, something that has triggered a debate among planetary scientists. One line of thinking is that Ryugu was originally part of a larger asteroid that broke up. But others contend the boulders could have landed over time or might have been hard masses incorporated into the asteroid at its formation and later exposed as softer material eroded away. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” Watanabe says.
This is the second ISAS mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid. The original Hayabusa, launched in 2003 to explore an asteroid named Itokawa, “has been a stunning success,” planetary scientist Erik Asphaug at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote in a commentary in Sciencein June 2006, despite engine failures, a daunting variety of mechanical malfunctions, fuel and solar power losses, and communications blackouts during a 7-year, 6-billion-kilometer odyssey. The return sample capsule, which landed in the Australian outback in June 2010, carried 1500 particles of asteroid dust, despite glitches with the sample collection mechanism. And even before Hayabusa touched down on Itokawa, it had returned enough data for scientists to publish a clutch of papers in Science, including one concluding that the asteroid was a loose agglomeration of rubble rather than a solid rock.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/japan-s-new-asteroid-probe-reaches-its-target-after-32-billion-kilometer-journey
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201807200017.html
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201807200017.html
“(The finding) is compelling evidence to prove that the Ryugu asteroid was formed by fragments of larger celestial bodies,” said Seiichiro Watanabe, head of the study team and professor of Nagoya University.
The Pyramid Texts allude to a "throne of iron" on which the pharaoh Cheops (also known as Khufu) would need to sit before he could pass the "gates of the sky" and reach the northern stars, where the ancient Egyptians believed the afterlife existed.
http://www.hip.institute/#press
https://gizmodo.com/are-you-ready-to-visit-ryugu-the-undersea-castle-in-th-1734885016
Contact is NEAR
https://gizmodo.com/heres-where-hayabusa2-will-try-to-land-on-the-asteroid-1828548850
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/08/japan-looks-for-landing-sites-on-mysterious-asteroid-ryugu
https://www.space.com/41602-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu-landing-site-selected-photos.html
http://www.hip.institute/#press
The asteroid was officially named "Ryugu" by the Minor Planet Center on 28 September 2015 (M.P.C. 95804).[11] The name refers to Ryūgū (Dragon Palace), a magical underwater palace in a Japanese folktale. In the story, the fisherman Urashima Tarō travels to the palace on the back of a turtle, and when he returns, he carries with him a mysterious box, much like Hayabusa2 returning with samples.[1][12]
The ScanPyramids[1] mission is an Egyptian-International project designed and led by Cairo University and the French HIP Institute (Heritage Innovation Preservation).[2] This project aims at scanning Old Kingdom Egyptian Pyramids (Khufu, Khafre, the Bent and the Red) to detect the presence of unknown internal voids and structures.[3]
The project, launched on October 2015,[4] combines several non-invasive and non-destructive techniques which may help to a better understanding of their structure and their construction processes and techniques. The team is currently using Infrared thermography, muon tomography, 3D simulation and reconstruction techniques.[5][6]
ScanPyramids is an interdisciplinary project mixing art, science and technology.[7] On November 2, 2017, the ScanPyramids team announced, through a publication in Nature,[8] its third discovery in the Great Pyramid, a "plane-sized"[9] previously unknown void named the "ScanPyramids Big Void".[10]
Contact is NEAR
https://gizmodo.com/heres-where-hayabusa2-will-try-to-land-on-the-asteroid-1828548850
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/08/japan-looks-for-landing-sites-on-mysterious-asteroid-ryugu
https://www.space.com/41602-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu-landing-site-selected-photos.html
The MA-9 site on the asteroid Ryugu, where the Hayabusa2 spacecraft's MASCOT lander will touch down on Oct. 3, 2018.
Credit: JAXA/DLR
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