Back in June this year I was utterly excited while writing on the feat of our brave space probe Hayabusa II heading for the tiniest planet Ryugu 300 million kilos away. Now, it has practically cleared the distance and is actually taking photos of the planet’s surface from amazingly only 100 meters away.

Hayabusa II left 4 years ago in December 2014, targeting Ryugu, a tiny planet, 900 meters in diameter orbiting around the sun between the earth and Mars, with a mission to land and collect rock specimens.

On top of that, the pace probe has another job to do – accomplishing a mission that it failed to accomplish 13 years ago: landing on the planet’s surface exploration robots to take a close look the “ground”. Two of the robots, MINERVA II-1, were suspended from 20,000 meters away up and released at 50 meters above the ground at 13:00 JST, says JAXA. Images from the robots due Sept. 22nd should tell whether or not they had successfully landed, according to JAXA.

The exploration robot is 1 kilo in weight, hexadecagonal in shape, and so built as to hop as it lands. The planet has too weak a gravity to allow the robot to move about on wheels. The robot attempts to test means to verify how to move about on gravity-meager planets. If successfully verified, the world should see for the first time how to walk on such planets, says JAXA.

The robots are powered by solar panels and operational only in daytime that oscillates in four hours. The remaining two are to be commissioned individually later next month.

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