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posted by chromas on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:20AM   Printer-friendly

Japanese spacecraft drops box-shaped robot on asteroid's surface

Overnight, Japan's asteroid-sampling spacecraft Hayabusa2 deployed its third robot onto the surface of an asteroid named Ryugu more than 186 million miles from Earth. This time, the robotic explorer is a tiny, box-shaped lander crafted by Germany and France's space agencies, dubbed MASCOT. While on the asteroid, the robot will hop around slowly and study the surface in detail, measuring things like temperature and the composition of nearby rocks.

[...] MASCOT is also able to move around in a similar way to Rover-1A and Rover-1B. In fact, engineers already opted to move the lander once it had reached the surface last night because they found that it was sitting at a bad angle. The mission team switched on MASCOT's mobility system, shifting the robot's position and placing it in a much more favorable orientation. The German space agency DLR says that now all of MASCOT's instruments are working just fine and are continuing to collect data.

The lander has a suite of four instruments on board to characterize Ryugu. These will allow MASCOT to take pictures, measure temperatures, figure out the different minerals on the asteroid, and measure the space rock's magnetic field. However, MASCOT's time on the surface of Ryugu is limited. It doesn't have any solar panels, so it's operating entirely off of an internal battery that lasts just 16 hours. The mission team says that, as of this morning, the lander has under seven hours left to complete its work.

Also at NPR.

Previously: Hayabusa2 Reaches Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Japan's Hopping Rovers Capture Amazing Views of Asteroid Ryugu


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:33AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:33AM (#743818) Homepage Journal

    I read that as "Japanese spacecraft drops short-lived robot on asteroid's surface". My dyslexia didn't give me a learning disability because the way I see entirely different words leads the sentences their in not to make any sense at all. But not always - this particular time I felt bad for the mission's staff then was puzzled as I read the article to find out what happened to that ill-fated robot.

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