Japanese spacecraft drops robot onto asteroid to hunt for the origin of the solar system

A robot has been successfully dropped onto an asteroid millions of miles from Earth – and will now hunt for the origin of the solar system. The German-French device known as MASCOT landed on an asteroid called Ryugu when it was dropped by a Japanese spacecraft. The spacecraft has been floating around the asteroid in recent days, and already dropped two devices to explore its surface – which sent back stunning photo and videos of the world. The robot had live tweeted its own descent to the asteroid. I'm descending to Ryugu! Can't stop me now!" its engineers posted on an account devoted to MASCOT. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance ...