An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A Japanese → asteroid sampling mission devoted to the study of → Ryugu. It was launched on December 3, 2014 and successfully arrived at the asteroid on June 27, 2018. The Hayabusa2 mission includes four rovers with various scientific instruments.

On September 21, 2018 the first two of these rovers, MINERVA-II robots, which hop around the surface of the asteroid, were released from Hayabusa2. This marked the first time a mission has completed a successful landing on a fast-moving asteroid body. This was followed later by the deployment of MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout), a lander developed by the German space agency DLR in partnership with the French Center for Spatial Studies (CNES). It carried four instruments and with its 16 h lifetime battery
collected data on the surface structure and mineralogical composition, the thermal behaviour and the magnetic properties of the asteroid. Hayabusa2 is expected to leave Ryugu with the collected samples in late 2019 and return to Earth in 2020.

See also: Hayabusa “peregrine falcon” in Japanese.