Do you remember in the movie Armageddon, how NASA sent a group of people up into space to rendezvous with an asteroid and blow it up because it was threatening Earth? Well, Japan has done something like that now, but with less explosives.
DLR
The country just got one of its spacecraft to grab onto an asteroid, about 321 million km away from Earth and pick off a tiny sample. It's actually the second time we've done this; NASA guided one of its ships onto an asteroid called Eros back in 2001.
The Hayabusa-2 was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) back in 2014. It travelled for over three and a half years before finally making it to the asteroid Ryugu ?in June last year, where it's been orbiting ever since, preparing for today's mission.
But earlier today, it fired up its engines, made a slow descent towards the big rock and shot a projectile at the asteroid to create some dirt and rock fragments. It (hopefully) gathered that up into an internal chamber, because those dirt samples are meant to come back to Earth. Here, they'll be analysed by scientists.
JAXA
It'll take a while for Hayabusa-2 to return, but researchers are already excited about what it could tell them. The asteroid has some of the oldest rocks ever formed, from around the Sun. And if they do predate the planets, they could tell us a lot about the birth of the universe.