The Japanese space agency (JAXA) has achieved something wonderfully brilliant this week. Their Hayabusa2 spacecraft, currently orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, successfully deployed two tiny, biscuit-tin-sized rovers onto the asteroid's surface.



JAXA Hayabusa2 Mission Page.



Because the gravity on Ryugu is so astonishingly weak, traditional wheeled rovers would simply float away if they tried to drive. Instead, these little rovers use internal rotating motors to literally hop across the rugged, boulder-strewn landscape. The raw images they have beamed back of the rocky, alien terrain against the blackness of deep space are simply extraordinary.