Peak Warming Man said:
>>today I will return the spacecraft to the home position (about 20 km from the center of the asteroid).
OK, give us a yell if you want a hand.
For some reason, when JAXA reports are translated from Japanese into English, the object is always referred to by pronoun “I”. For some odd reason, Google translate seems to do a better job of translating Japanese than most other languages.
More recent news from HAYABUSA2.
http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20180915/
Lander approaching Ryugu. As seen from main spacecraft (I think).
“you can see a black dot at the center of the bright part, but this is the shadow of “Hayabusa 2”. Just behind the scenes the light of the sun is hit and the shadow of the spacecraft is falling. You can better understand the shadow of the prospecting machine by watching it with animation. The image shown in Fig. 2 is shown as a movie.”
(Insert movie here)
“If you look at this video, you can see that as you approached, the ryugu grows bigger and the shadow of “Hayabusa 2” can be seen at the end. You can see that the shadow of “Hayabusa 2” does not move even if the ryugu rotates even if the distance approaches and it expands. It also appears to be fixed on the screen. For this, please see the “little detailed story” below. Hayabusa 2 about 6 m which is casting shadows on roughly 900 m above the earth by over 300 million km. It is magnificent, but it feels miserable.”
“As shown in Fig. 4, “Hayabusa 2” will descend along the line connecting the earth and the center of the crown. The sun is shining diagonally from the right direction in this figure. When “Hayabusa 2” descends, the shadow of “Hayabusa 2” comes from the left side of Ryuguu and moves to the right. Also, since sunlight can be thought of as parallel rays, the angle θ in Figure 4 hardly changes in a short time such as when the spacecraft descends. In other words, since the direction in which the shadow can be seen is almost the same even if the probe is descending”.
Ah, a close up at last.
