@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online
2026-07-06 06:37 UTC
The presentation will be in Japanese, but there's a JAXA press conference at 16:00 JST (~30 minutes) on the flyby of Torifune by Hayabusa2.
SHOW US A SPACE ROCK! And let's hug a 12 year old spacecraft that just pulled off a tight flyby it was never designed to do. Maybe we can save the world 🛰️👀🪨.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ptnVCeR3rqI
Replies (1)
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@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online 2026-07-06 07:21
HELL YEAH! Torifune is another Itokawa; a contact binary where two asteroids collided gently enough to merge. In the case of Itokawa, the two parts were likely fragments of the same parent asteroid that fragmented during a catastrophic collision, and then gentle bounced back together.