Nearly There

A Japanese spacecraft snapped this view of the asteroid Ryugu on June 24, from a distance of about 25 miles (40 km). The craft, Hyabusa-2, was scheduled to enter orbit around the asteroid on June 27. It will spend months studying Ryugu, which is about one kilometer (1,100 yards) in diameter, then deploy three small rovers. One of them will collect a small sample of material from the asteroid's surface and return it to the orbiting spacecraft, which will head back for Earth in late 2019. [JAXA/University of Tokyo/Kochi University/Rikkyo University/Nagoya University/Chiba Institute of Technology/Meiji University/Aizu University/AIST]