The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a spacecraft Wednesday with a seemingly straightforward mission of shooting an asteroid and bringing back a live sample.
According to the Associated Press, the Hayabusa2 space explorer is embarking on a six-year mission to eventually blast a crater in an asteroid and grab a piece of the space rock. The mission is expected to come to a head in mid-2018 and the craft should return to Earth in 2020.
If it successfully collects the asteroid sample after a separate device creates the crater, Hayabusa2 will spend 18 months analyzing the sample with its onboard laboratory. Like the Rosetta mission is trying to do with a comet, the new Japanese mission will be looking for evidence that can give scientists a window to the early stages of the solar system.
"The mission was completed one way or another, but we stumbled along the way," Akitaka Kishi, JAXA's lunar and planetary exploration program, told the AP. "To travel there and bring back something is extremely difficult."
According to Space.com, the space explorer took off at 1:22 p.m. on Dec. 3 local time (11:22 p.m. ET, Dec. 2) at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. Hayabusa2's target has been identified as 1999 JU3.
The first Hayabusa mission returned an asteroid sample to Earth in 2010 on a mission that took seven years, but Space.com described the new mission as "bolder."
"Minerals and seawater which form the Earth as well as materials for life are believed to be strongly connected in the primitive solar nebula in the early solar system," JAXA said in a statement on the mission. "Thus we expect to clarify the origin of life by analyzing samples acquired from a primordial celestial body such as [this] asteroid to study organic matter and water in the solar system, and how they coexist while affecting each other."
