October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
... lander, supplied by the German Aerospace Center DLR. It’s a direct descendant of the MASCOT-1 lander currently aboard JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 mission, embarked on a mission to Near-Earth Asteroid 1999 JU3 for a 2018 touchdown. MASCOT-2 will be largely...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... end of this century, we will probably only visit a handful with larger spacecraft like NEAR Shoemaker, or Japan’s Hayabusa. But nanosats could be sent in large numbers to examine hundreds of asteroids close up within a generation, at a much lower...
April 2019
On-board propulsion set to drive the smallsat revolution
..., if the neutraliser fails, the thruster may no longer be able to function correctly. This was a problem encountered on the Hayabusa spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on its return voyage from a near-Earth asteroid in 2007...
July 2019
Next steps in human space exploration
... Although our current focus is on robotic exploration and successful collection of a sample of the Ryugu asteroid using the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, the next step in human exploration is the lunar gateway and exploration of the Moon’s surface… and...
October 2020
Connecting the global space community
..., and the Mars2020 mission will collect material for a future Mars sample return mission. Meanwhile, JAXA’s Hayabusa mission will return samples from near-Earth asteroids (at the end of 2020), so next year we might have...
01 January 2020
What has been in 2019 and what is to come in 2020!
... International Space Station in the coming year, if all goes according to plan. Last but not least, the Hayabusa 2 asteroid sample return will be heading to Earth in December over the Woomera Test Range site in Australia to deliver...
