on September 21st Japan's Space Agency
made history it became the first country
to land not one but two Rovers on to an
asteroid and already the two unmanned
Rovers have sent back the first images
while on the surface and no so far it's
looking like there are no alien cities
on its surface but this mission called
Hayabusa 2 could ultimately help solve
one of the grandest scientific mysteries
of all where did life on Earth come from
scientists have been studying asteroids
for years NASA for example landed its
near shoemaker spacecraft on asteroid
eros in 2001 but it's Japan's Space
Agency that is the first to deploy a
pair of Rovers to explore an asteroid
surface Japan launched the Hayabusa 2
mission in December 2014 so it has
already been about three and a half
years in the making the spacecraft
rendezvous with its target in June 2018
snapping a series of pictures that
revealed the asteroids shape the
asteroid of choice was 160 to 173 you
goo or you goo for short in Japanese the
refers to a magical underwater dragon
palace now the asteroid flies through
space around the Sun every 16 months
conveniently between the orbits of Earth
and Mars making it an ideal target for
this mission which if all goes according
to plan will return a sample of the
asteroid to earth by the early 2020s as
the spacecraft flew closer to the
asteroid surface it prepared to deploy
its first two unmanned Rovers but these
guys aren't your typical space rover
they're slightly bigger than the size of
a large iPhone measuring just seven by
18 centimeters and they won't be driving
around on the asteroid surface they'll
be hopping yeah you heard that right
hopping Japan designed the rover's with
a spinning cylinder inside that gives it
the power to hop about a few meters at a
time this reduces the risk of getting
stuck on the rocky uneven surface but it
doesn't come without its own risks
asteroids are relatively small and
therefore have a weak gravitational pull
and even by asteroid standards you goo
is tiny it's less than a kilometer
across making it no larger than a few
city blocks so if the rover's hopped too
high they could potentially go flying
off into space but so far the mission
looks good the rover's have already
achieved their first hop now this may be
the first time Japan has landed on an
asteroid but it won't be the last these
two Rovers are just the first of four
that Japan aims to land on you goo the
other two Rovers are scheduled to land
within the next year in the process
Japan hopes to collect and return a
sample of you goo to earth so that
scientists can study it in more detail
looking for traces of water and organic
material if it turns out that asteroids
like you goo contain similar material
that we see on earth it would be strong
evidence for the idea that life on Earth
first came from asteroids billions of
years ago but this is a mystery that we
can only answer if we study asteroids
directly