Traveling to the origins of the Solar System

Asteroid data from the Hayabusa2 mission support collisional evolution of a pristine body In December 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 began its more than 2 billion miles journey to rendezvous and land on a rocky body with a diameter of no more than a kilometer. It arrived in June 2018, and on pages 272, 268, and 252 of this issue, the first observations of Hayabusa2's remote sensing instruments are reported by Kitazato et al. ( 1 ), Watanabe et al. ( 2 ), and Sugita et al. ( 3 ), respectively. Designed to probe the geology, morphology, and composition of the asteroid, this mission will help clarify the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago (see the figure).