Japan's Hayabusa2 Asteroid Journey Ends With a Hunt in Australia's Outback - The New York Times

The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan’s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presents one last challenge.

Japan’s space agency is nearing the end of a journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the earliest eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues about the origins of life on Earth.

These are being ferried to Earth by Hayabusa2, a robotic space probe launched by JAXA, Japan’s space agency, in 2014 to explore an asteroid named Ryugu, a dark, carbon-rich rock a bit more than half a mile wide.

The success of the mission and the science it produces will raise Japan’s status as a central player in deep space exploration, together with NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia.

But the immediate challenge will be searching in darkness for a 16-inch-wide capsule containing the asteroid samples somewhere amid hundreds of square miles in a region 280 miles north of Adelaide, the nearest large city.

In an interview, Makoto Yoshikawa, the mission manager, said there is an uncertainty of about 10 kilometers, or about six miles, in pinpointing where the capsule will re-enter the atmosphere.

The gases would also reassure the scientists that Hayabusa2 did indeed successfully collect samples from Ryugu.

In Japan, the Hayabusa2 team will begin analysis of the Ryugu samples.

To gather these samples, Hayabusa2 arrived at the asteroid in June 2018.

Part of the Ryugu samples will go to NASA, which is bringing back some rocks and soil from another asteroid with its OSIRIS-REX mission.

The OSIRIS-REX space probe has been studying a smaller carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu and it will start back to Earth next spring, dropping off its rock samples in September 2023.

Indeed, its name points to the existence of Hayabusa, an earlier mission that brought back samples from another asteroid, Itokawa.

So did JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft, currently in orbit around Venus, which the Japanese agency managed to restore to a scientific mission after years of difficulty.

Yoshikawa, the mission manager, said.

Dropping off the Ryugu samples is not the end of the Hayabusa2 mission.