"Hayabusa-2" made another rapprochement with Ryugu. NASA is looking for a place to create an artificial asteroid crater!

At the beginning of April 2019, Hayabusa-2 should shoot at the Ryugu asteroid from a height of 500 m with an SCI (Small Carry-on) penetrator

Impactor), consisting of a copper projectile weighing2.5 kg and 4.5 kg explosive charge. The projectile will crash into Ryuga at a speed of 2 km/h, and in the artificial crater that appears, the probe will take soil samples and be able to study the geological structure of the asteroid.

It is planned that at the end of 2019, Hayabusa-2 will start moving towards the Earth and will reach the planet at the end of 2020.

In early March 2019, the Hayabusy-2 team posted a video where the device landed on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu and fired a tantalum bullet at it.

Recently, the team of the mission "Hayabusa-2" showedthe results of the first month of operation of the probe in orbit around the asteroid Ryugu. Engineers presented a heat map of Ryugu. It turned out that there are many more rocky outcrops on the surface of the asteroid than scientists thought. In addition, the temperature of the soil ranges from room temperature to 100 ° C.