Hayabusa2 flies by asteroid Torifune

Sarah Al-Ahmed (0:06)

Hayabusa2 flies by Asteroid Torifune, this week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

This week, Paul Abell, NASA's Chief Scientist for Small Body Exploration at Johnson Space Center, joins us to talk about the Hayabusa2 extended mission flyby of Asteroid Torifune. We'll talk about what it revealed about this rare contact binary and what it means for planetary defense. Then Bruce Betts, our Chief Scientist, is here for What's Up, where we're going to talk about the projectiles that Hayabusa2 fired into Asteroid Ryugu. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it.

In July, 2026, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA's Hayabusa2 spacecraft, added another first to its already remarkable resume. After a year and a half at Asteroid Ryugu, collecting samples and blasting an artificial crater into its surface, Hayabusa2 dropped its sample capsule off at Earth in December, 2020, and just kept going. The extended mission, renamed Hayabusa2 SHARP, SHARP as in the musical notation, set a course for the tiny near-Earth asteroid called 1998 KY26, with a rendezvous planned for 2031 But on the way, the team lined up something extra, a flyby of an asteroid we now know as Torifune. Torifune is named for Ame no Torifune, a divine ship from Japanese mythology that carried gods between heaven and earth. JAXA picked the name through a public naming contest, which you know we love here at the Planetary Society, after all the ones that we've helped organize. The flyby happened on July 5th, and it was a genuinely difficult piece of flying. Hayabusa2 was never built to do flybys. It was designed to pull up alongside an asteroid and stay for a while, not to thread a needle at high speed. What the spacecraft found was a contact binary, two objects that came together and stuck, kind of like a cosmic snowman. Joining us today is Dr. Paul Abell, NASA's Chief Scientist for Small Body Exploration at Johnson Space Center. Paul has been part of the story from the very beginning. He was on the recovery team in the Australian outback in 2010 when the original Hayabusa spacecraft brought home the first samples ever collected from an asteroid. And after a journey so troubled, it's a minor miracle that that capsule actually made it back to Earth at all. Since then, Paul has served as a bridge between JAXA and NASA, helping the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx teams share some really hard-won lessons about landing on bolder covered worlds. He's been on both of those science teams, on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART Investigation Team, and he has an asteroid named after him. 8139 Paul Abell.

Hi, Paul. Thanks for joining us.

Paul Abell (3:20)

Hey, Sarah. Happy to be here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed (3:22)

It's such a fascinating realm of study, and I think most people, their ideas of studying small bodies and near-Earth objects mostly come from movies and Hollywood. But, I mean, the fact remains, this is a realm of science where you can make a marked difference in potentially saving the world someday. Do you ever feel that as you're doing this kind of science?

Paul Abell (3:42)

I mean, yeah. I mean, one of the things where I originally, I was in astronomy, right? In undergrad, I was looking at things like the quasars and galaxies. And there were many, many hundreds, if not millions of light years away.

For me, I was like, that's why I got hooked on the near-Earth asteroids because that's something that can be realized now and make an impact today or tomorrow, or in the very near future for people, right? Humanity. And so that's one of the things that attracts me about it, right? We're now to the point where we can go out and touch, in air quotes. Tag. Tag and all that, and these objects. And my first real experience with the near-Earth asteroid mission was while I was in grad school. I was very fortunate to be part of the near-Schoobanker mission to Asteroid Eros. And that's how I cut my teeth on missions. And it was there that one of the lead scientists, I remember his name vividly, and I was sort of his assistant, was Dr. Joe Viverka. And he said, you should get into this. You should do this more often.

And so I was like, yeah, sure, okay. You know, not really thinking, you know, it's like, okay, this gentleman is respected. He said that, and I had no idea. And yeah, I did. I just followed through with it. But precisely what you said is the near-Earth asteroid population, the small bodies in the inner solar system, can really make or make or break humanity, literally, right?