Japan's space agency JAXA's successful probe landing on the asteroid Ryugu is another worthy milestone in the human exploration of our cosmic backyard. Touching down on fast moving rock is nothing like landing an aircraft or parking a car. It takes great precision and skill and clearly the agency and Hayabusa-2 were up to the task. Ryugu is only a few hundred metres across and orbits the Sun at a maximum of 211 million kilometres and its path sometimes crosses between the Earth and Mars.

Hayabusa-2 blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in April this year in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface, before its successful landing on Ryugu three days ago to gather up the rock and soil debris. Here is an image captured just 4 seconds after landing:



Remarkable, don't you think? Man's exploration of space may be our only shot at some kind of immortality, written robotically, though sometimes with human footprints, in the planets, asteroids, moons and empty spaces around us.