 Hello everyone, today I wanted to talk about a topic that normally our resident astronomer Jared Head would be talking about, and that's Hayabusa-2 and its mission to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid this summer. Well Hayabusa-2 has taken its first image of that asteroid, and that's what I wanted to talk about today. This is your space pod for Tuesday, March 6th, 2018. Hayabusa-2 was launched on December 3rd, 2014 aboard an H-2A rocket, and it's a follow-up to Japan's first Hayabusa spacecraft, which rendezvoused with a near-Earth asteroid called Itukawa in 2005, and returned samples of that asteroid to Earth in 2010. And it was the first spacecraft to ever do so to return samples from a near-Earth asteroid to Earth, although the sample size was much less than expected, only a couple of grains of dust. However, Hayabusa-2 aims to address all the different weak points that were identified in that mission and return a bigger sample back to Earth. The probe still has over a million kilometers to cover in order to reach its target in June for a one-and-a-half-year exploration mission that will see the spacecraft dispatch a series of landers and an impactor, while also making contact with Ryugu itself to scoop up sample material and return that sample to Earth in December of 2020. The first optical images of Ryugu, only appearing as a really small speck of light there, have been taken by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on February 26th just this past week. And Ryugu is a 920-meter sea-type primitive body that is hoped to hold a treasure trove of scientific information that hopefully will have all the different preserved records of the early days of the formation of the solar system. And with that sample, we'll hopefully be able to advance that science even further. The asteroid was officially named Ryugu on October 5th of 2015, and its name refers to a Japanese folktale called Ryugu-jo, which means Dragon's Palace. The Dragon's Palace was a wonderful and magical palace at the bottom of the ocean, where the hero of the story, Urashimetaru, was brought by a turtle, and when he returned from that palace, he brought back with him a mysterious box, which, just like Hayabusa-2, will bring back a capsule with samples to Earth. Now, Hayabusa-2 was designed with ion engines to perform multiple long burns and adjust its course in its heliocentric orbit, and get a gravity assist from an Earth flyby and adjust its course as needed for the eventual rendezvous with a Ryugu in early June this year. Now, aside from the primary sample collection and return system that the space tax will have, it's also going to be dispatching four landers, the 10-kilogram mascot lander built in Europe for an in-sudo study of surface composition and properties, and three Minerva landers that were similar to a Minerva lander that was on the first Hayabusa spacecraft, which are going to deliver imagery and also have temperature measurements of the asteroid, and all the landers are going to make several hops across the asteroid's surface to take those different measurements at different locations, and another payload is going to be an impactor that's going to be deployed towards the asteroid and use high explosives to generate a really high-speed impact that's hoped to expose enough material so that it would be easier to collect a sample with Hayabusa-2 later, and there's going to be a deployable camera that hopefully will be used to document that impact of the penetrator, and here's just one other really cool time-lapse image that was taken by Hayabusa-2 on December 3rd of 2015 during its Earth flyby maneuver, and if everything goes according to plan, the return capsule should land in Australia, so hopefully everything goes well with this and we're going to see just in a couple of months what this asteroid's going to reveal, but don't forget if you haven't already to check out our last week's show, which we had Max Hope talking about launcher systems, and it's going to be a really interesting interview that we had for that, so definitely check it out, and be sure to check out every live show that we have every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time. Like, subscribe, and share these videos with your friends, and if you can support us on patreon.com or makersupport.com, but until the next time I see you guys keep moving onwards and upwards, and don't forget, add Astra to the stars.