The real title of the article is very different:

"Japan's Hayabusa2 probe completes flyby of Torifune asteroid"

The flyby already happened last Sunday.

I'll never work in Mission Control, but the Hayabusa2 website lets me pretend I do. Kudos to whomever designed this website:

https://haya2now.jp/en.html

Build your own - https://nasa.github.io/openmct/ :)

Interesting. Do you think people could really use openmct for a fun display or is it quite a heavy project to try to work with for that.

I know it's used for some racing sim stuff: https://github.com/nasa/openmct/discussions/6392

I see, thanks. Maybe it could be cool to make a light branch for personal sim projects.

If people love to watch novel use cases of dashboard software like Grafana etc, I highly recommend this video about it being used at a water treatment plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wucMZ9tb1I0

> During the flyby, Hayabusa2 was expected to approach as close as 800 meters from the center of Torifune and to capture images of the asteroid while traveling at a relative speed of 5 kilometers per second.

Imagine the sort of work required to get clear photos of that. It would be hard to show up at work the next day if all you have is a blurry streak like you're taking photos on a rollercoaster with a disposable camera in 1993.

Seems it was successful and they captured an image:

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/science-nature/science/20260...

My favorite space probe is the European Space Agency Philae. It probes the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and actually landed on it. It was able to send back images of its surface. Amazing!

It was certainly cute, but let's not forget that it was always just a "nice extra" to the main Rosetta mission. But it did teach us that landing on (and grabbing onto) a comet surface can be tricky and fail even if you're equipped with several contingency mechanisms.

BTW, ESA is unfortunately not nearly as famous for its public outreach work as NASA, but the Rosetta/Philae PR team was on fire, releasing an incredibly charming series of cartoon animations documenting the mission:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2016/12/The_amazin...

Be sure to watch until the very end for a very tear-jerking scene :')

And while you're at it, watch the related live-action short science fiction film "Ambition", starring Aidan Gillen: https://youtu.be/H08tGjXNHO4?si=wtEWdv6OmX5y7-eg

Both Hayabusa 1 and 2 did sample returns, this flyby is an afterlife extra.

It's such a pity about Philae. With just a little more luck, we could have gathered much more information about the comet, even though its achievements are already truly memorable. I wonder when we'll finally be able to land on a comet again.