Planetary Society logo
  • “Exploration is in our nature.” - Carl Sagan

Bruce Murray Space Image Library

635 meters from Ryugu

635 meters from Ryugu
635 meters from Ryugu On 11-12 September 2018, Hayabusa2 performed a dry run of most of the sequence it would need to perform in order to deposit a rover on the surface of Ryugu. The sequence aborted when the spacecraft got within 600 meters of the asteroid. On the way down, it observed its own shadow growing on the asteroid's surface. This is one of the last photos from the sequence, taken from a distance of 635 meters at 2018-09-12 03:58 Earth received time (about 17 minutes earlier, spacecraft event time). JAXA