No abstract

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft investigated the small asteroid Ryugu, which has a rubble-pile structure. We describe an impact experiment on Ryugu using Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor. The impact produced an artificial crater with a diameter >10 meters, which has a semicircular shape, an elevated rim, and a central pit. Images of the impact and resulting ejecta were recorded by the Deployable CAMera 3 for >8 minutes, showing the growth of an ejecta curtain (the outer edge of the ejecta) and deposition of ejecta onto the surface. The ejecta curtain was asymmetric and heterogeneous and it never fully detached from the surface. The crater formed in the gravity-dominated regime; in other words, crater growth was limited by gravity not surface strength. We discuss implications for Ryugu’s surface age.

[1] We have obtained a state-of-the-art picture of substorm-associated evolution of the near-Earth magnetotail and the inner magnetosphere for understanding the substorm triggering mechanism. We performed superposed epoch analysis of Geotail, Polar, and GOES data with 2-min resolution, utilizing a total of 3787 substorms for each of which auroral breakup was determined from Polar UVI or IMAGE FUV auroral imager data. The decrease of the north-south magnetic field associated with plasmoids and the initial total pressure decrease suggest that the magnetic reconnection first occurs in the premidnight tail, on average, at X $ À16 to À20 R E at least 2 min before auroral onset. The magnetic reconnection site is located near the tailward edge of a region of considerably taillike magnetic field lines and intense cross-tail current, which extends from X $ À5 to À20 R E in the premidnight sector. Then the plasmoid substantially evolves tailward of X $ À20 R E immediately after onset. Almost simultaneously with the magnetic reconnection, the dipolarization begins first at X $ À7 to À10 R E 2 min before onset. The dipolarization region then expands tailward as well as in the dawn-dusk directions and earthward. We find that the total pressure generally enhances in association with the dipolarization, with the contribution of high-energy particles. Also, energy release is more significant between the regions of the magnetic reconnection and the initial dipolarization. The present results will be helpful as a reference guide to developing the overall picture of magnetotail evolution and studying the causal relationship between the magnetic reconnection and the dipolarization as well as detailed mechanisms of each of the two processes on the basis of multispacecraft observations.