So What Happened To The MASCOT Lander On The Asteroid Ryugu?

It’s been a while since I looked at the successful deployment and mission of the German MASCOT lander, which was deployed on the asteroid Ryugu on October 2nd. Powered by batteries, it was designed to do a few hops on the surface, take photos, do some scans, and last only about 12 hours which, at the time of my previous article on the little probe, had come and gone.

Since then there have been a set of updates via Twitter on the status of this boxy little pioneer – apparently it did 3 hops on the surface and successfully scanned 3 separate areas of the asteroid, also lasting longer than planned and, most importantly, before its batteries died it was able to send all the data it collected back to Earth.

Damned impressive. Now for the data it collected to be studied and understood so we know more about some of the most primitive parts of our solar system.

 

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