JAXA’s Asteroid Explorer “Hayabusa2”

Lecture di Stefania Soldini
Research Associate of JAXA’s Hayabusa2 Project Team

Stefania Soldini is Research Associate of JAXA’s Hayabusa2 Project Team. She is responsible for the solar conjunction phase. Dr Soldini joined JAXA in 2016 first with a JSPS Post-Doc Fellowship and then in 2017 as a Fixed-Term staff. She gained her PhD degree in 2016 at the University of Southampton, UK and previously graduated for both her Master and Bachelor’s degrees in Space Engineering from Politecnico di Milano.

Hayabusa2 mission is the Japanese sample and return mission to Ryugu asteroid and successor of previous JAXA’s Hayabusa mission to asteroid Itokawa. On 27th of June 2018, Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully approached Ryugu and marked the start of an 18 months exploration. Scientists are now evaluating the “history” of Ryugu and seek to understand if such a small “world” can carry the information of the origin of Life and of the solar system formation. The exploration of Ryugu is extremely difficult and set new engineering challenges as the recent successful touchdown operation and impact experiment. In this talk, I would like to present the latest achievement in Hayabusa2’s mission operations and the upcoming schedule. I would also briefly present my role and tasks within the Hayabusa2 flight dynamics team.