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Japan’s Hayabusa2 asteroid mission has performed the last major act in its saga of space exploration. At 10:18 a.m. Tokyo time on 11 July, the spacecraft descended on the asteroid Ryugu for the second time this year, to collect material from a crater it gouged out in April by striking the body’s surface with a pellet. If the collection was successful — something that the mission team will not know for a while — it will be the first time in history that a mission has gathered material from an asteroid’s innards