At the beginning of April 2019, the automatic station Hayabusa-2 began a large-scale operation to obtain a sample of soil from the inner layers of a 500-meter near-earth asteroid (162173) Ryugu, which she has been studying for over a year. To do this, the SCI (Small Carry-on Impactor) penetrator was dropped on the asteroid, which led to the creation of an artificial impact crater. All the main stages of this operation saw onboard and descent cameras, and then the station managed to examine the crater itself. Soon after that, Hayabusa-2 dropped a reflective marker-pointer towards it.
The team of the Hayabusa-2 interplanetary mission published several images taken during the second (final) ground acquisition operation from Ryugu, an asteroid, held on the morning of July 11, 2019.
Early in the morning of July 11, 2019, the station successfully made a second soil sampling from the area C01-Cb, which is located near the artificial crater. Scientists were able to get a sample of soil from the subsurface layer of soil Ryugu, which was not exposed to solar radiation and cosmic rays. At the moment of closest approach to the asteroid's surface, the apparatus fired a tantalum bullet at it, after which it collected scattered small fragments of rock using a soil collecting device and began a sharp ascent to the main 20-kilometer orbit at which it will be on the morning of July 12th. About 15 minutes after the start of the ascent, the station switched to a high gain antenna and began telemetry transmission.
Hayabusa-2 has already been able to tell astronomers that Ryugu is a half-hollow "pile of rubble", is the darkest of all the celestial bodies visited by spacecraft and may be a remnant of a larger celestial body with a radioactive core.
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