A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday, in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.<\/p>\n
The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.<\/p>\n
The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-metre-wide Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.<\/p>\n
Moving at a speed of more than 18,000 kilometers (11,185 miles) per hour, Hayabusa2 was not intended to collide with Torifune.<\/p>\n
Instead, scientists wanted to assess whether they could precisely control the trajectory of the probe, should it ever need to perform a deflection.<\/p>\n
“At 6:35 pm (0935 GMT)… Hayabusa2 conducted a flyby of Torifune and the spacecraft is working normally,” a JAXA spokeswoman told AFP, declining to give her name.<\/p>\n
Online footage supplied by JAXA showed scientists applauding in a control room.<\/p>\n
“I was nervous, I felt on edge the whole time… But I’m really glad we were able to see it through to the end,” one of the scientists told the JAXA broadcast.<\/p>\n
If it is confirmed that the space probe indeed came within 800 meters of Torifune, the mission would be one of closest flybys of a near-Earth asteroid ever.<\/p>\n
“It’s as difficult as trying to shoot through a one-yen coin somewhere within the area stretching from Okinawa to Hokkaido,” Yuya Mimasu of JAXA said earlier, referring to Japan’s southernmost and northernmost islands.<\/p>\n
Cameras on board Hayabusa2 are also recording data from the asteroid’s surface including geographical features, its texture and temperature — vital information for a potential planetary defense mission.<\/p>\n
“Is the surface consisting of bare rock, or cover(ed) by boulder fields or sand beaches? Only images taken by a spacecraft can reveal this information,” Patrick Michel, project scientist at the European Space Agency, told AFP prior to the flyby.<\/p>\n
“If we want to deflect an asteroid by an impact, the response is not the same if the asteroid is behaving like a sponge or if it behaves like a very solid material,” he said.<\/p>\n
The space probe’s mission is not based on any actual threat to Earth from an asteroid.<\/p>\n
Launched in 2014, Hayabusa2 has already thrilled scientists by landing on and gathering material from the asteroid Ryugu, some 300 million kilometers (185 million miles) from our planet.<\/p>\n
Six years later, it returned to Earth precious samples from Ryugu — “dragon palace” in Japanese — providing scientists with clues about what the solar system was like at its birth some 4.6 billion years ago.<\/p>\n
After the Torifune mission, the space probe is expected to attempt in 2031 a “rendezvous” — a maneuver where it flies alongside or touches down on a space rock to gather detailed data — with another asteroid, called 1998KY26.<\/p>\n
Even after the success of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), Sunday’s ambitious flyby is hugely worthwhile, European Space Agency scientist Michel said.<\/p>\n
“Given the diversity of near-Earth asteroids in terms of size, shape, surface and internal properties, each new image makes us better prepared.”\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday, in a test mission for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[85,46,141],"class_list":["post-527317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}