It’s a lander bonanza on the asteroid Ryugu. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has just dropped off its third lander on the surface of the asteroid.
The Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander is the largest of four that Hayabusa 2 will be deploying on Ryugu over the course of its mission. It is a box about 30 centimetres across and 20 centimetres tall, weighing just under 10 kilograms. It doesn’t move around using wheels, like most rovers, but using a tungsten arm that swings around to make the lander tumble and hop across the ground.
MASCOT is fitted with a camera, a radiometer to measure the temperature of the surface and surrounding dust, a spectrometer to investigate what the dust is made of, and a magnetometer to determine Ryugu’s magnetic field.
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“Hayabusa 2 will take samples, but it will destroy the surface when it takes the samples,” says Ralf Jaumann at the German Aerospace Center, MASCOT’s principal investigator. “MASCOT will give us the context of the samples from the surface, the ground truth.”
Unlike the mission’s other landers, which are powered by solar panels, MASCOT only has a 16-hour, non-rechargeable battery, so it will be a mad rush to tumble around and take measurements from three different spots on the surface.
“It is a stressful day, not only for us but for MASCOT itself,” says Jaumann. “MASCOT has to do everything itself, we cannot really control it – we just have to hope we’ve really thought of all the possibilities that could happen and programmed them into the computer.”
Researchers hope that the measurements from this lander will help figure out exactly what Ryugu is made of, which could help confirm how it was formed. Because asteroids like this one are relics of the early solar system, this could also help us understand the history of the planets.
