Jason Davis • Jul 11, 2018
New goodies from asteroid Ryugu!
Hayabusa2 arrived at asteroid Ryugu back on June 27. Since then, it has been holding at a distance of 20 kilometers while flight controllers back on Earth check out its instruments. At the end of July, the spacecraft will start descending to a height of just 5 kilometers for medium-altitude observations.
The project has been quiet for a couple weeks, but today, JAXA released some new goodies! First, two new global views, the second of which really brings the bright object at the north pole into focus:
![Ryugu global view 1, 20 km](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_576x576_crop_center-center_60_line/20180711_fig1.jpg 576w)
![Ryugu global view 2, 20 km](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_576x576_crop_center-center_60_line/20180711_fig2.jpg 576w)
And here's a fancy rotation video! Get out your red-and-blue 3-D glasses for this one:
![Ryugu global 3D animation](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/20180711_stereoMovie_20180623.gif)
The raw file is a little small, so here's a blown-up version:
Finally, over at unmannedspaceflight.com, Roman Tkachenko used the new data to make an updated shape model of Ryugu.
"It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing," he writes. (Personally, I think it's pretty awesome.)
The Time is Now.
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