Thread by @Astro_Jonny

There is a Japanese spacecraft called Hayabusa 2 (@haya2e_jaxa) arriving at an asteroid in the next few days.

It hasn’t had a lot of love or attention yet. But this mission is FRICKING AWESOME. I’m going to tell you why.

Thread (1/n)

Hayabusa 2 is a mission to return material from inside an asteroid called Ryugu to Earth, something that's never been done before (2/n)

It’s the successor to the somewhat successful Hayabusa mission in the early 2000s, which returned samples from another asteroid to Earth in 2010, but had a few problems spaceanswers.com/space-explorat… (3/n)

Hayabusa 2 was launched in December 2014, and has taken three and a half years to reach Ryugu (4/n)

It’s now just 150km away, and will reach 20km on 27 June. In August, it’ll be just 1km away. Ryugu itself is only about 1km across, and looks like a dumpling

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(5/n)

On board it has – get this – FIVE different landers. Five! It’s got three rovers, a German-built lander, and an impactor. I'm pretty certain no other mission has had more than one (6/n)

In September/October the rovers will deploy, and they’ll hop across the surface to study it. The German lander (pictured), meanwhile, can perform a single hop. Still cool (7/n)

The impactor is the main event though. It will slam into the asteroid and create an artificial crater, exposing fresh material inside (8/n)

In 2019, Hayabusa 2 will descend to the surface and scoop up material from this crater. Then, in December 2019, it’ll return to Earth (9/n)

The spacecraft will approach our planet sometime in 2020, and deploy a capsule with the sample safely inside, which will land on Earth (10/n)

This sample could tell us a whole bunch about how what’s inside asteroids. If they pull this mission off, it’s going to be fantastic (11/n)

So, let’s give Hayabusa 2 some love. It hasn’t had a huge amount of headlines, but it’s doing so many awesome things. Definitely deserves a good chunk of attention. Good luck @haya2e_jaxa! (end/n)