4 September 2018
Determination of landing site candidates!
The Landing Site Selection (LSS) conference was held on August 17, 2018 and the candidate landing locations for touchdown, MASCOT and MINERVA-II-1 on the surface asteroid Ryugu were decided. Candidate points marked on the image of Ryugu captured from an altitude of about 6km. The image was taken on July 20, 2018 by the Optical Navigation Camera – Telescopic (ONC-T).
The figure below is is a map of asteroid Ryugu showing the landing candidate locations. Please note the direction of north and south on this map.
The areas within the colored lines in figure are the candidate areas for the landing sites for the touchdown of the Hayabusa2 mothership (for sampling), MASCOT and MINERVA-II-1. These are labelled as: