After shooting bullet, Japan plans to bomb targeted asteroid

Last month Japan’s spacecraft landed on an asteroid to gather samples, for which it shot a space bullet at it. Now, Japan is planning a more daring maneuver to gather more samples from the asteroid by bombing it to create a crater.

Japan’s space agency JAXA announced its plans for its robotic spacecraft Hayabusa2 that will drop a bomb, the size of a baseball, on the asteroid Ryugu next month on April 5, which will blow a huge crater on it and the craft will mine some of the exploded fragments that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays.

Watch Japan’s spacecraft grab asteroid sample by shooting bullet at it

Hayabusa2 will launch a bomb at the surface of the asteroid at just over a mile per second, which is expected to carve out a 32ft wide crater. Then, the spacecraft might even visit the crater itself, but JAXA assured that the probe’s safety will be its priority if landing in the crater is too dangerous.

As per Futurism, if the mission goes according to the plan, the Hayabusa2 will mark itself to be the first ever spacecraft for mining subsurface materials from an asteroid. “It will be very challenging,” JAXA engineer Takanao Saeki told the AP.