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It'southward not every mean solar day that a robot sends dorsum footage from the surface of an asteroid, but today is such a twenty-four hour period. The Japanese Hayabusa mission successfully deployed several pocket-sized robots last week, and at present we've gotten a batch of images and video from the little drum-shaped drones. This is only the beginning of Hayabusa's science operations, merely it'southward all the same pretty fascinating.

JAXA's Hayabusa probe began endmost on the asteroid Ryugu over the summer, post-obit a zig-zag pattern to maneuver into position. But a few days agone, the spacecraft jettisoned a payload called MINERVA-II1. Inside that butt-shaped shell were the "rovers" known as MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B.

It's non exactly fair to call the landers rovers considering they don't have any wheels — they are wheels. Ryugu is just a few hundred meters across, and so its gravity isn't enough to hold a small rover downwardly while its wheels spin. Something like Curiosity or Opportunity would just float away. Then, MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B incorporate motors that permit them shift their weight to hop across the surface. It could have equally long as xv minutes for the rovers to come to a stop after each hop, merely in that location are cameras and temperature sensors spread across the surface to capture information no matter how they land.

The surface explorers have taken numerous images of the terrain, including close-up shots of the terrain and even one that shows rover 1A'south antenna casting a shadow. Hayabusa itself also captured a loftier-resolution image of the asteroid'due south surface as information technology descended to drib off the rovers. JAXA but released that one also.

Equally for the video, well, don't become your hopes upwards. A video is technically just a collection of however frames, and that's what this looks like. MINERVA-II1A captured the fifteen-frame video on September 23 between 10:34 and 11:48 JST. Then, that'due south one frame every four-five minutes, making it a somewhat jerky timelapse. However, it's a jerky timelapse from the surface of an asteroid, and that's all the same awesome.

Hayabusa volition pepper Ryugu with several more robots as the mission progresses, so it will effort to scoop up a sample of the asteroid to send back to Earth. It will make a full of three attempts with the starting time two making use of a kinetic slug fired at the surface. The hope is it will launch material toward the probe for collection. The third attempt will use a small explosive projectile to create a crater from which Hayabusa tin collect sub-surface material. This role of the mission won't brainstorm until side by side year.

At present read: Chinese Scientists Want to Capture a Small Asteroid and Land it on Earth, NASA Sets New Roadmap for Moon Base, Crewed Missions to Mars, and Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua Came From 1 of four Nearby Stars