MINERVA, short for MIcro-Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid, is a series of small rovers developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA to explore the surfaces of asteroids. The first MINERVA rode on the Hayabusa mission and was released on 12 November 2005 to land on asteroid 25143 Itokawa, but it missed the asteroid and ended up in a heliocentric orbit. MINERVA-II was a series of three rovers carried by the successor mission Hayabusa2. Two of them successfully landed on asteroid 162173 Ryugu on 21 September 2018. The third malfunctioned before deployment but was released anyway on 2 October 2019 to make gravitational measurements before it impacted the asteroid a few days later.
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Operated By
Source MINERVA (spacecraft) (Wikipedia)
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1. MINERVA (spacecraft) (Wikipedia)
History, first paragraph
On 9 May 2003, the MUSES-C spacecraft carrying MINERVA was launched from Kagoshima Space Center, and was named Hayabusa.
Operated By: JAXA, Lead sentence
a series of rovers developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA
Part Of: Hayabusa Mission, Lead sentence [part-of]
The first MINERVA was part of the Hayabusa mission
In Group: Asteroid Probes, Lead
developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA for the purpose of exploring asteroid surfaces
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