Spacecraft · tracked live
Hayabusa2
Landed on the asteroid Ryugu, fired a copper impactor into it to expose material the sunlight had never touched, and dropped a capsule of the samples into the Australian desert in December 2020. The spacecraft itself never stopped: it kept its remaining fuel and is on an extended cruise to another asteroid in the 2030s.
- Agency
- JAXA
- Launched
- 2014-12-03 - still working
- From the Sun
- 156,443,351 km (+168,437 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 73,861,647 km (+396,266 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 4 min
- Travelling at
- 27 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A loop round the Sun on an extended mission: the samples are home and the spacecraft is not. Small burns and Earth flybys are aiming it at the fast-spinning asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.
Along the way
- Earth flyby
- Arrived at Ryugu
- First touchdown, and a sample taken
- Fired an impactor to open a fresh crater
- Left Ryugu for home
- Dropped the samples over Australia and flew on
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.