The task scheduled for Friday will be the riskiest yet of Hayabusa2's investigations.
The mission will be the latest in a series of explorations carried out by the Japanese space agency's Hayabusa2 probe and could reveal more about the origin of life on Earth.
The probe will then depart the area, and the impactor is programmed to explode 40 minutes later, propelling the copper bottom towards Ryugu, where it should gouge a crater into the surface of the asteroid that sits 300 million kilometres from Earth. The camera should be able to transmit those images, but it is unclear when the first confirmation of the mission's success will come.
The crater could be as large as 10 metres in diameter if the surface is sandy, but a smaller three metres across if it is rocky, according to JAXA scientists.NASA's Deep Impact project succeeded in creating an artificial crater on a comet in 2005, but only for observation purposes. The asteroid is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water from some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was born.
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