A Japanese spacecraft just threw two small rovers at an asteroid

This morning, a Japanese space probe deposited two tiny rovers on an asteroid nearly 200 million miles from Earth. The vehicle is Hayabusa2, and the rovers were the first in a series of robots that the vehicle will throw at the asteroid’s surface over the next few months.Operated by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hayabusa2 is tasked with grabbing a sample from an asteroid named Ryugu and returning those materials to Earth. The spacecraft launched in 2014 on top of a H-I