#jaxa

Japan's space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine and arguably more difficult—a comet. The Next Generation Small-Body Return (NGSR) was recently described in a paper presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), and is under assessment as a large-class mission for the 2030s. Its main target is the comet 289P/Blanpain, a unique comet that has an interesting history. It was originally discovered in 1819, but was then considered "lost" for two centuries, eventually being rediscovered in 2003. Originally it was misidentified as a near-Earth asteroid due to its relatively low activity, but was confirmed as a comet after it had an unexpected outburst of activity in 2013. It's extremely small, with an estimated 160 meter radius. But the most important feature is its relatively low rate of gas and dust production—making it a much safer environment for NGSR to perform proximity operations in than an actively erupting larger comet.

Happy Thanksgiving from the International Space Station crew to you! They were joined today by the crew of Soyuz MS-28, including first time NASA astronaut and physicist Chris Williams. Today also marks the 500th total day in space for astronaut Mike Fincke!

Sometimes, asteroids are more than just big space rocks.

(A visual showing the Hayabusa2 spacecraft's deep-space flyby on the left, and a close-up photograph of the Torifune on the right.)

Recently, JAXA's Hayabusa2 just returned the first close-up images of Torifune, revealing that it's a contact binary. In other words, two separate asteroids drifted together so gently that, instead of smashing each other apart, gravity and ridiculously low collision speeds let them fuse into one peanut-shaped object.