On Thursday night, a Japanese spacecraft will try to fire a bullet at a giant rock in space. If it succeeds, it could help advance understanding of how our planet formed in the early solar system. In ...

Asteroid Ryugu is proving to be one of the most scientifically valuable time capsules in the solar system. A recent study of microscopic grains collected from Ryugu by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft ...

The French-German Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, launched from the Hayabusa2 probe, landed safely on Ryugu and was in contact with its team, the lander's official Twitter account said. "And ...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Minerva-II1 rover captured this view of asteroid Ryugu (bottom) and the Hayabusa2 spacecraft (at top right) just after the rover separated from the spacecraft ...

NASA has received samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The samples were collected by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Credit: NASA ...

Much remains to be known about the chemical composition of small asteroids. Their potential to harbor valuable metals, materials from the early solar system, and the possibility of obtaining a ...

A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) review of data collected from near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu supports the hypothesis that they were originally part of the Polana collisional family in the ...