Japan launches its Hayabusa 2 on its asteroid capture mission

Japan has launched its Hayabusa 2 space module successfully - it blasted off on an H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan after being delayed by bad weather. This space module is on a six-year return trip which has a specific mission of blowing a hole in a remote asteroid. The broad objective is to find clues to how our planet the Earth evolved.
The space explorer separated once the rocket had climbed out of the Earth's gravitational pull and would make use of the Earth's gravity as a slingshot to propel it towards its target.
The target is an asteroid identified as 1999JU3 – this is in deep space and this carbonaceous asteroid is believed to contain organic matter and water, the basic ingredients of life.
It is expected that Hayabusa 2 would reach the destination in mid-2018 and spend around 18 months in the area to be able to collect materials that have remained unexposed to millions of years of wind and radiation and bring them back to Earth by 2020. Hopefully, the answers could provide valuable clues about life and the universe.
Incidentally, this Japanese mission has come after the European Space Agency had succeeded in making the first-ever landing on a comet and images sent back from robot lab Philae, after its release from its mothership Rosetta, has revealed traces of organic molecules and a surface much harder than imagined.