Japan seizes the initiative from the US – sends probe to mine an asteroid

Japan is set to launch a space probe Hayabusa2 aboard main H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan on a six-year mission to mine a distant asteroid. This has been disclosed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
The takeoff was scheduled for yesterday but had to be postponed due to bad weather.
The 31 billion ($333 million) project is to send a probe towards the 1999 JU3 asteroid in deep space. The activities of the probe would be to blast a crater in the asteroid in order to collect virgin materials unexposed to millennia of solar wind and radiation for study.
The objective would be to find answers to the fundamental questions about life and the universe.
Hayabusa2 is about the size of a domestic refrigerator and is expected to reach the asteroid in mid-2018 – it would be there for approximately 18 months studying the surface. Such a timeframe would allow Japan to go one-up over the US because the tentative plan of NASA is looking at a possible 2025.
Incidentally, President Barack Obama had suggested a mission on similar lines. He wanted NASA to try to seize or lasso an asteroid where astronauts could go and explore it for finding valuable data on how the planet Earth evolved and, as per reports of NASA, it is making progress on one of the most challenging parts of its ambitious asteroid-retrieval mission — to locate a suitable rock to shrink-wrap in space. It seems scientists have identified a dozen or so promising targets for the mission. The plan is to drag a small rock — or a piece of a larger one — into a stable orbit around the moon, where it would be visited by astronauts by 2025.