Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2” is a successor of “Hayabusa” (MUSES-C), which revealed several new technologies and returned to Earth in June 2010.
While establishing a new navigation method using ion engines, Hayabusa brought back samples from the asteroid “Itokawa” to help elucidate the origin of the solar system. Hayabusa2 will target a C-type asteroid “Ryugu” to study the origin and evolution of the solar system as well as materials for life by leveraging the experience acquired from the Hayabusa mission.
To learn more about the origin and evolution of the solar system, it is important to investigate typical types of asteroids, namely S-, C-, and D-type asteroids. A C-type asteroid, which is a target of Hayabusa2, is a more primordial body than Itokawa, which is an S-type asteroid, and is considered to contain more organic or hydrated minerals -- although both S- and C- types have lithologic characteristics. Minerals and seawater which form the Earth as well as materials for life are believed to be strongly connected in the primitive solar nebula in the early solar system, thus we expect to clarify the origin of life by analyzing samples acquired from a primordial celestial body such as a C-type asteroid to study organic matter and water in the solar system and how they coexist while affecting each other.
|Target body||Ryugu (C-type, Near Earth Object)|
|Launch Date||December 3, 2014|
|Launch Location||Tanegashima Space Center|
|Launch Vehicle||H-IIA Launch Vehicle No.26|
|Orbit||Round trip between Earth and an asteroid|
|Scheduled arrival at destination||2018|
|Scheduled return to Earth||2020|
|Duration of stay at the asteroid||about 18 months|
|Major onboard instruments||Sampler mechanism, Re-entry capsule, Laser ranging (LIDAR, light detection and ranging), Scientific mission equipment (near infrared and thermal infrared), Impactor, Rover (MINERVA-II)|