Japanese probe set for super-close flyby on July 5:

Japan's Hayabusa2 sample-return spacecraft is on target to make one of the closest ever flybys of a near-Earth asteroid in early July, as part of its extended mission campaign.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 and rendezvoused with the asteroid Ryugu four years later. The spacecraft collected samples and delivered them to Earth in 2020, completing its primary objectives. But the hardy spacecraft still has bold plans to deliver new and exciting science data.

The spacecraft has been operating well, despite needing to briefly enter a protective safe mode last year, and now is set to make a flyby of the asteroid Torifune on July 5, Satoshi Tanaka of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a presentation on Hayabusa2 during the 35th Meeting of the NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) on June 11.

The flyby will see Hayabusa2 get within 1 to 10 kilometers (0.62 to 6.2 miles) of Torifune, using its instrument suite to study the roughly 450-meter-wide (1,476 feet) asteroid as it whizzes past at 5.3 kilometers per second (3.3 miles per second).

"This is one of the closest asteroid encounters ever attempted by a mission of this class," Tanaka said. "By combining advanced navigation techniques and the engineering capabilities of Hayabusa2, we have made it possible to achieve a flyby at a distance of only about 1 kilometer."

Torifune was first given the designation 2001 CC21 before being named for a deity from Japanese mythology. Tanaka says the asteroid is somewhat similar to Itokawa — the target of Japan's first Hayabusa mission — but little is known for sure about Torifune, adding a level of uncertainty to this extended mission objective.

"It's still a risky operation, because they had not planned for this," Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Hera asteroid mission and part of the Hayabusa2 science team, told Space.com. "The second thing is that we have a high uncertainty on the size of the object," he added, with the dimensions of the asteroid unknown.

The asteroid could, for example, be a contact binary, according to Michel, in which two separate bodies came together at low velocities. Known contact binary small bodies include the Kuiper belt object Arrokoth, imaged by NASA's New Horizons, and comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, described as a "rubber duck" when visited by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft.

"We're going to discover what it looks like. And each time we have seen a new asteroid, we've been surprised," Michel said. "We're going to discover another beast to put in the zoo of asteroids."

The very high velocity of the flyby means there will be limited time to collect images and other data on the asteroid, but the rapid encounter will also provide a useful test for planetary defense, as well as adding to planetary science.

The flyby, using advanced navigation techniques to guide and control the spacecraft, will be a useful test of a rapid reconnaissance concept that could be used to determine the physical properties of an asteroid. Such reconnaissance could provide vital information before intercepting a threatening asteroid with a kinetic impact, as demonstrated by NASA's DART mission in 2022.

Tanaka said that Hayabusa2 has been busy during its deep space cruise phase, including making observations of the zodiacal light and exoplanets, and the Torifune flyby will, hopefully, not be its final act. The ultimate goal of the Hayabusa2 extended mission is to visit the tiny asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031, which would be the smallest asteroid ever visited. The spacecraft could even attempt to land on the miniscule world, which is just 11 meters (36 feet) wide.

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Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter @AJ_FI.