Hayabusa 2 launches to asteroid Ryugu

On 3 December 2014, an H-IIA rocket climbed away from the cliffs of Tanegashima Space Center on Japan's southern coast, carrying a spacecraft built to finish what its predecessor had barely survived. The original Hayabusa had limped home in 2010, crippled and years late, with only micrograms of asteroid dust. Hayabusa2 was its redemption: sturdier ion engines, redundant systems, and a far more ambitious target, the carbon-rich asteroid 162173 Ryugu, a body thought to preserve water and organic chemistry from the Solar System's birth.

After three and a half years of patient ion-engine cruising, Hayabusa2 arrived at Ryugu on 27 June 2018 and found a spinning-top-shaped rubble pile roughly 900 metres across, strewn with boulders and almost nowhere safe to land. The team adapted. In September 2018 its MINERVA-II1 robots became the first rovers ever to move across an asteroid, hopping through the feeble gravity, and in October the German-French MASCOT lander worked for about 17 hours on the surface.

Then came the precision strikes. On 22 February 2019 Hayabusa2 swooped down, fired a projectile into the surface and caught the flying debris. That April it detonated a device that drove a copper impactor into Ryugu at around two kilometres per second, blasting open an artificial crater. On 11 July 2019 the spacecraft touched down again beside the wound and collected subsurface material never weathered by space, a first in exploration history.

On 6 December 2020 a capsule streaked like a fireball over Woomera, Australia, and was recovered in the desert that morning. Inside was 5.4 grams of Ryugu, 54 times the mission's 0.1-gram requirement, dark grains that laboratories found laced with amino acids and water-bearing minerals. The mothership never came home; it swung past Earth and is still flying an extended mission, with a flyby of asteroid 2001 CC21 in 2026 and a rendezvous with tiny, fast-spinning 1998 KY26 planned for 2031.