Watch Japan's Asteroid Bomb Fall And Impact Video

Today we've compiled photos, videos, and data from the Japanese asteroid mission on Asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Most exciting is the BOMB the group dropped on the asteroid – and the explosive results. But we've also gathered images to make video of the group's lander bouncing off the space body's surface! It's not every day you see video captured by a craft bouncing off the surface of an asteroid careening through space!

First have a peek at this massive map made by Phil Stooke from the University of Western Ontario. He's taken image data and coordinates and made a full map of the asteroid. Stooke marked the various points of contact JAXA's made and showed how far from the bounce point the group dropped their bomb.

On April 24th, Shift 1 for the Crater Search Operation (Post-SCI) (CRA2) began at 14:30 JST. On April 25 at 10:45 JST, the spacecraft dropped down to 2000m above the surface of the asteroid. This was the search for the crater created by the bomb, marked "CRA2 operation observation area" on the map below.

At its lowest, the CRA2 mission got down to 1.6 – 1.7 km altitude above the surface of the asteroid. At this point, images of the newly created crater were captured. These can be seen at the tail end of the video you'll see just below this paragraph.

This is part of the Hayabusa2 mission collective which shows all media collected by the Hayabusa2 craft. This craft was launched approximately 1608 days ago, and has traveled 3883470x10(to the 3rd) km (and counting.) The craft is currently approximately 294426.78x10(to the 3rd) km away from Earth as this article is scheduled to go live.

Imagery and video in this article were gathered from several sources. The stabilized land/bounce video originates at The Planetary Society from Jacint Roger Perez. For more information on this mission, head down to our short timeline of links below. This mission's far from over!