Two small robots have begun hopping around the surface of asteroid Ryugu.
It’s a tricky process. Ryugu is tiny and has very little gravity, so the rovers there move around by hopping. When they land, some 15 minutes later, it is usually quite far from where they took off. On Saturday, Rover 1A returned an early picture of its new home world during one of its first hops.
This picture is indecipherable, but they are hoping for many more photos from the robots, as well as other forms of research. One goal of the project is to take surface samples and send them back to earth. I’m not talking about sending the analysis back to earth, but the actual, physical sample!
Ryugu comes very close to Earth – within a quarter of the distance to the moon at the closest point.