A spacecraft must land on gravity 100,000 times weaker than Earth
To pluck a sample from the asteroid 2016 HO3, a robotic explorer must master a gravitational pull so faint that a human could jump into orbit.
Navigating to a rock like 2016 HO3 is like trying to hit a moving speck of dust from across a continent. Because the asteroid is only about 100 meters wide, its mass is too small to pull a spacecraft toward it with any meaningful force. On this tiny world, gravity is 100,000 times weaker than on Earth, meaning a landing is less of a touchdown and more of a delicate docking maneuver in open space.
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