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posted by martyb on Thursday February 21 2019, @10:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-puck-made-of-tantalum? dept.

[Please accept my apologies for the late posting to the site. I *thought* I had it queued up with plenty of time, but somehow messed up somewhere. --martyb]

The Japanese Space Agency's Hyabusa-2 probe is about to touch down on the asteroid 162173 Ryuga.

A live stream of the event will be available here starting at 4:45pm ET

The asteroid-circling spacecraft won't land so much as delicately brush the surface of Ryugu. During the late stages of descent, the probe will fire a tantalum pellet at the asteroid surface. The 650-mile-per-hour collision will create a plume of dust and debris that Hayabusa-2 will attempt to scoop up with an instrument dubbed the Sampler Horn.

This is equivalent to a bit over 6x the speed of the fastest slapshot ever recorded in an Ice Hockey Rink.

This will be the first of three passes to collect rock and dust samples from the asteroid. Samples will be returned to Earth in 2020.

Also at phys.org and sciencenews.org


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  • (Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Friday February 22 2019, @12:31AM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 22 2019, @12:31AM (#804801) Journal

    There's a tantalum pellet that is fired at 650mph to blow away the solar wind weathered surface and kick up particles from underneath that are more representative of the early solar system, the lander itself floated down very slowly and over the course of an hour covering somewhere around 160m (if I remember right)

    There's a press conference coming up on it that will be livestreamed also at "11am this morning" - presumably that means 9pm ET

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