Japan's Two Hopping Rovers Successfully Land On Asteroid Ryugu (space.com) 76
sharkbiter shares a report from Space.com: The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu -- and they've even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely.
In order to complete the deployment, the main spacecraft of the Hayabusa2 mission lowered itself carefully down toward the surface until it was just 180 feet (55 meters) up. After the rovers were on their way, the spacecraft raised itself back up to its typical altitude of about 12.5 miles above the asteroid's surface (20 kilometers). The agency still has two more deployments yet to accomplish before it can rest easy: Hayabusa2 is scheduled to deploy a larger rover called MASCOT in October and another tiny hopper next year. And of course, the main spacecraft has a host of other tasks to accomplish during its stay at Ryugu -- most notably, to collect a sample of the primitive world to bring home to Earth for laboratory analysis. JAXA tweeted on Saturday: "We are sorry we have kept you waiting! MINERVA-II1 consists of two rovers, 1a & 1b. Both rovers are confirmed to have landed on the surface of Ryugu. They are in good condition and have transmitted photos & data. We also confirmed they are moving on the surface."
In order to complete the deployment, the main spacecraft of the Hayabusa2 mission lowered itself carefully down toward the surface until it was just 180 feet (55 meters) up. After the rovers were on their way, the spacecraft raised itself back up to its typical altitude of about 12.5 miles above the asteroid's surface (20 kilometers). The agency still has two more deployments yet to accomplish before it can rest easy: Hayabusa2 is scheduled to deploy a larger rover called MASCOT in October and another tiny hopper next year. And of course, the main spacecraft has a host of other tasks to accomplish during its stay at Ryugu -- most notably, to collect a sample of the primitive world to bring home to Earth for laboratory analysis. JAXA tweeted on Saturday: "We are sorry we have kept you waiting! MINERVA-II1 consists of two rovers, 1a & 1b. Both rovers are confirmed to have landed on the surface of Ryugu. They are in good condition and have transmitted photos & data. We also confirmed they are moving on the surface."
Wow, look at the neat stuff you can do (Score:2, Insightful)
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Thanks.
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Appreciate it.
Re:1 B for reusable rockets (Score:1)
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Re: Fermi Paradox (Score:1)
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Not sure about the math there trying to tax the weapons exporters, but the rest of your comment is spot-on!
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Imagine the people we could have lifted out of poverty while creating a stronger nation, economy, and safer world. With the money we are spending on war shit we could have turned this planet into a garden of peace and prosperity a few times over.
I'd like to see your math on that.
Here's mine.
The USA spent about $600 billion for the military in 2017.
We could use that money to feed people in Africa instead buying bombs and guns.
$600 billion would buy about $1.25 of food a day for every person in Africa. I'm not seeing prosperity there.
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Considering most of the regions touched by famine have opulation wit $10/month of income, that's already 4x what they earn.
Re: 1 B for reusable rockets (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you buy food for people in africa or other starving places, you do two things...
1, make them dependent on your handouts
2, cause them to have more kids - thus requiring larger handouts in future
African countries like Zimbabwe used to have no trouble feeding themselves, in fact they used to export a lot of food.
Proper education is needed, not handouts of food, and they need to actually want the education and learn from it.
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Insightful mod?
Not Offtopic?
Re: 1 B for reusable rockets (Score:4, Insightful)
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Education only works for people with cocks, but not pussies? Well, that's certainly cleared up a couple of centuries of error.
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Please don't insult people by assuming they are American.
Gendered versus non-gendered languages are definitely confusing. Almost as confusing as two-gender versus three-gender languages. Or, for that matter, languages with versus without articles.
"It" or "one" is perfectly acceptable English, even if it may (or may not) be unacceptable in American. I don't know, because I don't speak American.
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Once they're no longer at risk of starvation, the motivation to do anything goes away...
You give freebies and people will become lazy, not bother to learn anything and just wait for more freebies.
Re: 1 More Kids (Score:1)
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I'd like to see your math on that.
Here's mine. The USA spent about $600 billion for the military in 2017. We could use that money to feed people in Africa instead buying bombs and guns. $600 billion would buy about $1.25 of food a day for every person in Africa. I'm not seeing prosperity there.
Why Africa? Start with your own poor before sorting out other entire continents.
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I read that US school teachers are buying supplies with their own money. That's just crazy.
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
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It's amazing how you've forgotten what a pain in the ass you were as a child unless your energies were channeled into creative, constructive projects. After reviewing the list, and especially noting that the list is broken up by grade level (you probably didn't note that and thought the entire list was for one student), I have concluded that it is quite limited for a 180 day school year.
Also your notion that a teacher would be handed a credit card carte blanche is ridiculous. They'd be given a budget maxi
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Imagine where we would be and what we could have done... interstellar by now.
Like the voyager probes? Well, kind of anyway.
Re:Wow, look at the neat stuff you can do (Score:5, Informative)
The Japanese space agency's budget, or at least the last known report listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] since budgets aren't public info, is far less than that of NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA. This mission is a remarkably ambitious example of doing more with less.
Japan has the most advanced space program ! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Japanese space agency's budget ... is far less than that of NASA, Roscosmos and the ESA. This mission is a remarkably ambitious example of doing more with less.
Considering what their relatively puny budget, Japan's space program is arguably the most advanced in the world.
They tried all sorts of new stuffs, such as this one:
A low cost version of the rocket which can be quickly assembled, with off-the-shelf parts commonly used by many other electronic industries [nikkei.com]
While the above rocket ended as a failure, it does illustrate the Japan's willingness to 'think outside of the box' - which, unfortunately, has been critically lacking in NASA and other space agencies, from Russia to India to Europe to China.
Re:Japan has the most advanced space program ! (Score:5, Interesting)
The SS-520 you have linked, after a couple failed launches, finally launched a cubesat to the orbit successfully earlier this year.
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I hope their research into quiet supersonic aircraft comes to fruition one day.
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I guess you've forgotten about NASA's mars rovers, lunar mapping probes, and the NEAR satellite that visited the asteroid Eros. They were the result of a new philosophy:
Faster, Better, Cheaper
Re:Intentionally set back (Score:1)
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Your feelings about clothes matter.
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"Involved in authoring 70 scientific papers — focusing, in the word of NASA’s website, “on energetic particle dynamics in near-Earth space and in the interaction of the Sun’s solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field”
= not a dumb-ass.
With regard to his shirt: "He chose poorly" - and someone was offended, somewhere, somehow.
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someone was offended
And that's what matters. Until we all decide to tell people who take offense that we don't care about their feelings any more than they care about ours.
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Well, that "dumbass" managed to land a probe on a comet. Meanwhile all these "smart" outraged women...? What did they give the humanity?
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... women's feelings about a shirt designed by a woman.
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Gravity.
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Same as it works on a large asteroid. Or a small moon. Etc, u.s.w., i.t.d.
Re:How does gravity work on a small asteroid (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't make any sudden moves and no one floats away!
The "rovers" hopping mechanism would barely make them twitch in Earth gravity - on Ryugu it results in 15-meter hops. That may last something of order of an hour too.
new name (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty amazing they will beat NASA back by 2 years (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like they will have material from an asteroid back some two years earlier than NASA!
Pretty exciting though that potentially we could have material from two different asteroids to compare. I've not looked into the NASA mission, hopefully they are also getting a ways down inside the asteroid... would be interesting to see a comparison of the two missions and what capabilities each had.
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In Earth gravity? The most they'd manage to do would be twitch powerlessly on a desk.
I'd just like to say.... (Score:2)
Omedetgozaimasu
Did some blogger ruin it for everyone...? (Score:1)
..by claiming the scientists and engineers were misogynists?
Phobos (Score:1)