Hayabusa-2 Mission

• The Hayabusa-2 mission was launched in 2014 when the spacecraft was sent on a six-year voyage to study Ryugu, a near earth asteroid. It was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA). 
• The spacecraft arrived at the asteroid in mid-2018. In 2019, the spacecraft fired an impactor into the asteroid’s surface to create an artificial crater with a diametre of a little more than 10 metres, which allowed it to collect the samples.
• In 2020, Hayabusa-2 delivered a small capsule that contained the rock and dust samples, which safely landed in the South Australian outback.
• Hayabusa-2’s predecessor, the Hayabusa Mission, brought back samples from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010.

Why in News?

• Since the capsule landed on Earth, scientists have been studying the material — weighing merely a few grams, but approximately 4.6 billion years old — in order to explore the foundations of the solar system. 
• Recent analysis of Ryugu’s samples supports the hypothesis that organic matter, potentially the very seeds of life, could have been delivered to Earth from space.
• This ongoing research could provide further insights into the influx of primitive space materials to Earth. It not only deepens our understanding of asteroids like Ryugu but also sheds light on the complex journey of organic materials through the solar system.

Related Information

What is an asteroid?

• Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the sun. Although asteroids orbit the sun like planets, they are much smaller than planets.
• Most of them live in the main asteroid belt—a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
• Some asteroids are found in the orbital path of planets. This means that the asteroid and the planet follow the same path around the sun.
• Most asteroids are irregularly shaped, though a few are nearly spherical, and they are often pitted or cratered. 
• As they revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, the asteroids also rotate, sometimes quite erratically, tumbling as they go. 
• More than 150 asteroids are known to have a small companion moon (some have two moons). 
• There are also binary (double) asteroids, in which two rocky bodies of roughly equal size orbit each other, as well as triple asteroid systems.

Types of Asteroid

• Main Asteroid Belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, generally with not very elongated orbits. 
• Trojans: These asteroids share an orbit with a larger planet, but do not collide with it because they gather around special places in the orbit where the gravitational pull from the Sun and the planet are balanced by a trojan’s tendency to otherwise fly out of orbit. 
• Near-Earth Asteroids: These objects have orbits that pass close by that of Earth. Asteroids that actually cross Earth’s orbital path are known as Earth-crossers. More than 10,000 such asteroids are known, out of which over 1,400 are classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs).

• Ryugu is also classified as a PHA and was discovered in 1999 and was given the name by the Minor Planet Center in 2015. It is 300 million kilometres from Earth and it took Hayabusa-2 over 42 months to reach it.

Why do scientists study asteroids?

• Since asteroids are one of the oldest celestial bodies in the Solar System, scientists study them to look for information about the formation and history of planets and the sun.
• Another reason for tracking them is to look for asteroids that could possibly crash into Earth, leading to potentially hazardous consequences.