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Hayabusa2's first touchdown rehearsal

Hayabusa2's first touchdown rehearsal

JAXA / Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa2's first touchdown rehearsal
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. The images for this animation were taken by the wide-angle optical navigation camera.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For uses not allowed by that license, contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

Original image data dated on or about September 12, 2018

Explore related images: asteroid 162173 Ryugu, pretty pictures, Hayabusa2, amateur image processing, asteroids, animation

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