Data from the Hayabusa2 probe showed changes in speed and direction, indicating it had touched down on the asteroid and was blasting back to its orbiting position, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

 

About 50 members of the operation team and some 20 other people who were monitoring the developments Friday morning at JAXA’s control room, in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, erupted in joy when signals arrived confirming Hayabusa2 had landed and fired a projectile, pumping their fists, clapping and hugging.

“We have completed our mission,” JAXA Research Director Takashi Kubota told reporters.

“Today, the hand of humankind has reached a new starlet,” said Hayabusa2 Project Manager Yuichi Tsuda, an associate professor at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, at a news conference. “The touchdown was in the best conditions, and as desired.”

The asteroid is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water from some 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar system was born.

After landing, the probe was set to return to its orbit around Ryugu, with further touchdowns planned for later in the year.

Hayabusa2 will eventually fire an “impactor” to blast out material from underneath Ryugu’s surface, allowing the collection of “fresh” materials unexposed to millennia of wind and radiation.

Scientists hope those samples may provide answers to some fundamental questions about life and the universe, including whether elements from space helped give rise to life on Earth.

Communication with Hayabusa2 is impossible at times because its antennas are not always pointed toward Earth.

The mission has not been completely plain sailing, and the probe’s landing was originally scheduled for last year.

That was pushed back after surveys found the asteroid’s surface was more rugged than initially thought, forcing JAXA to take more time to find a suitable landing site.

The Hayabusa2 mission, with a price tag of around ¥30 billion ($270 million), was launched in December 2014 and is scheduled to return to Earth with its samples in 2020.

Photos of Ryugu — which means “dragon palace” in Japanese and refers to a castle at the bottom of the ocean in an ancient Japanese tale — show an asteroid shaped a bit like a spinning top, with a rough surface.

Hayabusa2 observes the surface of the asteroid with its camera and sensing equipment but has also dispatched two tiny Minerva-II rover robots, as well as the French-German robot Mascot, to help surface observation.

Scientists are already receiving data from those probes deployed on the surface of the asteroid.

The 10 kilogram (22-lb.) observation robot Mascot is loaded with sensors and can take images at multiple wavelengths, investigate minerals with a microscope, gauge surface temperatures and measure magnetic fields.

At about the size of a large fridge, Hayabusa2 is equipped with solar panels and is the successor to JAXA’s first asteroid explorer, Hayabusa — which is Japanese for falcon.

That probe returned from a smaller, potato-shaped asteroid in 2010 with dust samples, despite various setbacks during its epic seven-year odyssey, and was hailed as a scientific triumph.

 

But that progress was suddenly reversed last year, when Trump prematurely declared victory in the aftermath of his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. On Wednesday and Thursday, Trump will hold his second summit with Kim. If he repeats the same mistake, his own administration’s efforts to isolate North Korea will take another beating and Kim will have even less reason to end his weapons program.

 

Before the Singapore summit, the Trump administration had been strengthening United Nations sanctions against North Korea, emphasizing enforcement and reaching out to African countries to secure their support. And this combination of U.S. high-level engagement, cajoling and arm twisting led several African governments — including those of Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Angola — to announce that they would scale back their ties to North Korea. While some committed to expelling North Korean military trainers, others promised to stop buying North Korean arms and doing business with U.N.-sanctioned companies. These steps promised to isolate North Korea further and reduce its access to the hard currency needed to sustain its nuclear and missile programs.

Sadly, what took years to achieve was lost in a single day. In a characteristically grandiose and unsubstantiated tweet, Trump declared on June 13 that, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Though his own vice president and intelligence chiefs would later voice very different conclusions, Trump was committed to selling the fiction of a diplomatic breakthrough, even to the point of stifling U.S. diplomats. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December, “Many in the Trump administration have been instructed to remain quiet on North Korean defiance over concern speaking out could undercut the image of an effective sanctions regime or weigh on negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.”

With the Trump administration focused wholly on propping up a false narrative, African governments with illicit ties to North Korea no longer had to worry about U.S. pressure over sanctions, nor did they have any incentive to follow through on their promises to cut ties. After all, for African countries, North Korea poses no direct security threat, but does offer friendship, cheap arms and infrastructure investments.

Since Trump started pretending that he has ended the North Korean nuclear threat, African countries have likewise been pretending to end ties with the Kim regime. Though they are being more surreptitious about it, North Korean commandos are still training Ugandan soldiers, and North Korean companies like Malaysia Korea Partners and Mansudae are still flouting sanctions and making money in Africa. And U.S. officials are hamstrung, unable to respond appropriately, lest they be seen as contradicting the White House’s official line.

It is not surprising that Trump chose showmanship over substance, or that he scuttled a long-term sanctions enforcement effort in the process. But the significance of this blunder should not be understated. Trump’s single tweet and ongoing self-delusion about North Korea’s nuclear program will likely leave the U.S. with fewer options for isolating or confronting the Kim regime long into the future.

For North Korea, the foothold in Africa is of great importance, especially if and as the U.S. convinces China and Russia to curtail their own illicit support for the Kim regime. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity at MIT, North Korea’s trade with African countries has provided the regime with hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years. At the same time, a U.N. Panel of Experts has singled out North Korea’s connections to various African countries as a concerning weak spot in global sanctions enforcement.

Trump has personally undercut years of work to isolate North Korea and deprive it of funding, thereby expanding the Kim regime’s options and reducing pressure on it to negotiate peaceful disarmament. Unless Trump aligns his claims with reality after the upcoming summit with Kim in Vietnam, he will further weaken the sanctions enforcement regime needed to choke off the international relationships that enable North Korea to sustain its weapons programs. Self-proclaimed victories on Twitter don’t count.

Grant T. Harris was special assistant to the president and senior director for African Affairs at the White House from 2011-2015. © Project Syndicate, 2019 www.project-syndicate.org