A Japanese probe flew 400 metres (1,312 feet) from a near-Earth asteroid this month, marking the closest approach ever recorded in such a mission, the space agency has said.<\/p>\n
The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 skimmed asteroid Torifune on July 5, in a flyby mission that demonstrated the ability to deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.<\/p>\n
Moving at a speed of more than 18,000 kilometres (11,185 miles) per hour, the probe reached 400 metres from the asteroid\u2019s surface and 744 metres from its centre, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
This has beat the agency\u2019s projection of about 800 metres from the centre of Torifune.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe results show that, compared with all the space probes from around the world that have carried out flyby missions, this one passed the closest\u201d to an asteroid, JAXA scientist Yuya Mimasu told reporters.<\/p>\n
The previous record was set by a Chinese probe, which flew within 770 metres of an asteroid\u2019s surface, according to the Nikkei business daily.<\/p>\n
After the successful flyby, JAXA has released rare images showing the space rock resembled a snowman.<\/p>\n
The black-and-white image, captured by a telescopic camera, showed what appeared to be two round objects joined together.<\/p>\n
Torifune was known to have an elongated shape, but its details were unknown.<\/p>\n
The mission follows NASA\u2019s successful 2022 test that changed the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos by deliberately smashing it with a spacecraft.<\/p>\n
JAXA and the European Space Agency have teamed up on another so-called \u201cplanetary defence\u201d mission to explore the\u00a0asteroid Apophis, which will pass close to Earth in April 2029.<\/p>\n
Launched in 2014, Hayabusa2 has already thrilled scientists by landing on and gathering material from the asteroid Ryugu, some 300 million kilometres (185 million miles) from our planet.<\/p>\n
Six years later, it returned to Earth precious samples from Ryugu \u2014 \u201cdragon palace\u201d in Japanese \u2014 providing scientists with clues about what the solar system was like at its birth some 4.6 billion years ago.<\/p>\n
After the Torifune mission, the space probe is expected to attempt in 2031 a \u201crendezvous\u201d \u2014 a manoeuvre where it flies alongside or touches down on a space rock to gather detailed data \u2014 with an asteroid called 1998KY26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Japanese probe flew 400 metres (1,312 feet) from a near-Earth asteroid this month, marking the closest approach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[217,215,420,214,216,1473,1417],"class_list":["post-67003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-business-of-japan","tag-international","tag-japans-business","tag-japanese-business","tag-mna","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}