Can a spacecraft land on a teeny tiny asteroid? Japan's Hayabusa2 will certainly try

An illustration of a spherical asteroid with a small space probe sitting on top of it with a solar panel.

The Hayabusa2 mission is facing a new challenge after observations showed the asteroid it is going to rendezvous with and touchdown on in 2031 is much smaller than previously thought; it's also spinning much faster.

"We found that the reality of the object is completely different from what it was previously described as," Toni Santana-Ros said in a statement. Santana-Ros is an astronomer at the University of Alicante and affiliated with the University of Barcelona, and led the observations of the asteroid with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.