Keynote Lecture / Special Session Speaker

Hayabusa2: Successful Sample Return from Asteroid Ryugu

Yuichi Tsuda
JAXA / ISAS

Abstract: Hayabusa2 is an asteroid exploration probe, developed and launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which visited a carbonaceous (C-type) asteroid Ryugu in 2018-2019, and returned to Earth in December 2020. Although the mission faced many hardships due to unexpectedly severe environment of Ryugu, it finally succeeded in landing and sample collection on two different locations on the asteroid surface, four mobile robots delivery for surface exploration, and generation of a very large artificial crater for the impact science and subsurface investigation. Hayabusa2 brought back 5.4g of Ryugu sample to Earth, whose analysis is currently ongoing, and is about to be delivered to institutes and laboratories all over the world.
This presentation will review the mission history, achievements and discuss the contributions from / to multidisciplinary engineering and its management that made this historical accomplishment possible.

Biography: Yuichi Tsuda received his Ph.D. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from University of Tokyo in 2003, and joined Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) in 2003 as a research associate. He became an associate professor in 2014, and a professor in 2020 of ISAS/JAXA. He was a visiting scholar of Dept. of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan and Dept. of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder in 2008-2009. He was the deputy lead of the IKAROS, the world’s first interplanetary solar sail mission in 2009-2013. From 2015, he is the project manager of the Hayabusa2, an asteroid sample-return mission. His research interests are astrodynamics, spacecraft system and deep space exploration.