On July 5, 2026, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft completed the first asteroid encounter of its extended mission, flying past the two-lobed near-Earth asteroid Torifune and returning its close-up visible and thermal images.
This image of the near-Earth asteroid Torifune was captured with the ONC-T instrument aboard JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on July 5, 2026. Image credit: JAXA / University of Tokyo / Chiba Institute of Technology / Institute of Science Tokyo / AIST / Paris Observatory / IAC.
Built by JAXA, Hayabusa-2 launched in 2014 on a mission to visit Ryugu, a carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid thought to preserve primitive material from the birth of the Solar System.
After arriving in 2018, the spacecraft spent more than a year mapping the asteroid, deploying tiny ‘hopping’ rovers and the German-built MASCOT lander, and performing sampling operations.
In April 2019, Hayabusa-2 fired a copper projectile into Ryugu to blast open an artificial crater. The mission scientists hoped to collect samples that had been shielded from billions of years of space weathering.
The spacecraft later descended to gather some of that freshly excavated material.
When the return capsule landed in Australia in 2020, laboratory studies revealed that Ryugu’s samples contained water-bearing minerals, organic molecules and other compounds that shed light on the chemistry present during the Solar System’s formation about 4.6 billion years ago.
Unlike many missions that end after delivering their cargo, Hayabusa-2 continued its journey.
After releasing the sample capsule, the probe fired its engines once again, embarking on an extended mission to visit the near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031.
Along the way, it is also scheduled to perform a high-speed flyby of the small asteroid Torifune (also known as 2001 CC21) in 2026.
This thermal image of Torifune was captured with the TIR instrument aboard JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on July 5, 2026. Image credit: JAXA / Maebashi Institute of Technology / Chiba Institute of Technology / University of Aizu / Hokkaido University of Education / AIST.
The flyby took place on July 5 at 18:30 JST, when Hayabusa-2 sped past the asteroid at roughly 5 km per second.
The spacecraft obtained visible-light images with its Optical Navigation Camera (ONC-T), showing that Torifune is an elongated, two-lobed asteroid resembling a snowman.
“From about one hour before the closest approach, observations were also conducted using the NIRS3 (Near-Infrared Spectrometer), TIR (Thermal InfraRed Imager), and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) instruments,” members of the mission said in a statement.
“These observations continued until immediately before the closest approach to Torifune but could not be conducted after the spacecraft had passed the asteroid.”
“At present, only part of the data acquired by the scientific instruments has been transmitted to Earth,” they added.
“The remaining data will be transmitted to the ground during future operations.”
