The rovers will jump around on the surface -- soaring as high as 15 metres and staying in the air for as long as 15 minutes |
A pair of robot rovers have landed on an asteroid and begun a survey, Japan's space agency said Saturday, as it conducts a mission aiming to shed light on the origins of the solar system.
The rover
mission marks the world's first moving, robotic observation of an asteroid
surface, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The round,
cookie tin-shaped robots successfully reached the Ryugu asteroid a day after
they were released from the Hayabusa2 probe, the agency said.
"Each
of the rovers is operating normally and has started surveying Ryugu's
surface," JAXA said in a statement.
Taking
advantage of the asteroid's low gravity, the rovers will jump around on the
surface -- soaring as high as 15 metres (49 feet) and staying in the air for as
long as 15 minutes -- to survey the asteroid's physical features.
"I am
so proud that we have established a new method of space exploration for small
celestial bodies," said JAXA project manager Yuichi Tsuda.
The agency
tried but failed in 2005 to land a rover on another asteroid in a similar
mission.
Hayabusa2
will next month deploy an "impactor" that will explode above the
asteroid, shooting a two-kilo (four-pound) copper object to blast a small
crater into the surface.
From this
crater, the probe will collect "fresh" materials unexposed to
millennia of wind and radiation, hoping for answers to some fundamental
questions about life and the universe, including whether elements from space
helped give rise to life on Earth.
The probe
will also release a French-German landing vehicle named the Mobile Asteroid
Surface Scout (MASCOT) for surface observation.
Hayabusa2,
about the size of a large fridge and equipped with solar panels, is the
successor to JAXA's first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa -- Japanese for falcon.
That probe
returned from a smaller, potato-shaped, asteroid in 2010 with dust samples
despite various setbacks during its epic seven-year odyssey and was hailed as a
scientific triumph.
The
Hayabusa2 mission was launched in December 2014 and will return to Earth with
its samples in 2020.
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