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The last time Hayabusa2 was seen with the naked eye, Barack Obama was the president of the United States and Brexit was a distant europhobic fantasy.
Six years and three days after the start of its groundbreaking mission, the Japanese spacecraft will launch a capsule into the Australian outback carrying pristine asteroid fragments on board that scientists believe could shed light on the formation of the solar system and the origins of life.
By the time it reaches the skies above Woomera in South Australia in the early hours of Sunday, the spacecraft will have completed a round trip of approximately 6 billion km (3.7 billion miles) which included two short stops on the surface of an asteroid.
The unmanned aircraft will release the capsule from a height of approximately 220,000 km (136,700 miles), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) said.
Sunday’s operation will mark the culmination of a 30 billion yen (£ 215 million) mission that began when Hayabusa2, whose name means hawk in Japanese, left the Tanegashima space center in southwestern Japan in December 2014. .
The spacecraft reached its stationary position above the asteroid – named Ryugu after an underwater dragon palace in a Japanese fairy tale – in June 2018 after traveling 3.2 billion km in an elliptical orbit around the sun for more than three years.
One of the mission’s many critical phases occurred in February last year, when it briefly landed on Ryugu and fired a tiny tantalum bullet at the asteroid’s surface to raise dust for collection, before returning to its holding position. .
Five months later, it reached world record when it landed a second time to collect displaced rock fragments and soil from beneath the 4.6 billion-year-old asteroid’s surface.
Jaxa he believes those subsurface samples contain carbon and organic matter which, having been protected from space radiation and other environmental factors, are in the same state they were in when the solar system was formed.
Makoto Yoshikawa, a mission manager of the Hayabusa2 project in Jaxa, said the scientists were particularly interested in analyzing the organic materials in the Ryugu samples.
“Organic materials are the origin of life on Earth, but we still don’t know where they come from,” Yoshikawa said during a briefing. “We hope to find clues to the origin of life on Earth by analyzing the details of the organic materials reported by Hayabusa2.”
The capsule, protected by a heat shield, will transform into a fireball upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere 200 km above the ground. About 10km from the ground a parachute will open and, if all goes according to plan, the capsule will send signals indicating its position on the ground.
Jaxa experts, who arrived in Woomera last month, have installed satellite dishes at several points to pick up the signals, while the Australian space agency and the Department of Defense will be waiting to help with the search and recovery mission.
Without local assistance, the search for the capsule, which is only 40 cm in diameter, “would be extremely difficult,” Yoshikawa said.
However, at that point, Hayabausa2’s work will not be completed yet. After releasing the capsule, it will head for another distant asteroid, named 1998KY26, on a mission that is expected to last a decade.
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