Japan Captures Stunning Two-Headed Asteroid In Daring Historic Flyby
Japan’s veteran Hayabusa2 spacecraft recently completed a daring, ultra-close flyby of the asteroid Torifune, sending home the first-ever close-ups of a bizarre "two-headed" asteroid located 62 million miles from Earth.
JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) confirmed that on July 5 the probe skimmed just 800 meters from the center of the 450-meter-wide space rock. Traveling at a relative speed of 5 kilometers per second (roughly 11,000 mph) the spacecraft had only a fleeting window to lock its instruments onto the target. This achievement is impressive because Hayabusa2 was originally engineered for the slower orbital operations, not lightning-fast flybys. Mission controllers had to pre-program precise tracking sequences for the onboard Optical Navigation Camera–Telescopic (ONC-T) to ensure the asteroid wouldn't blur out of frame during the encounter.
Previously, ground-based telescopes had hinted that Torifune was highly elongated, but Hayabusa2’s images confirmed that the object is a contact binary, effectively two separate...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hothardware.com. To see the full text click HERE
