Case in point is Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which, following the landing of Philae on on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko last month, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) confirmed was successfully launched today at 1:22:04 pm JST from the Tanegashima Space Center on a mission to not only land on an asteroid, but to bomb it.

According to JAXA, the unmanned Hayabusa 2's liftoff atop its H-IIA rocket went off without a hitch and the spacecraft achieved its Earth-escape trajectory one hour, 47 minutes and 21 seconds into the flight. It will now spend the next year orbiting the Sun before making a flyby of the Earth, which will boost it to a high enough speed to rendezvous with the C-type asteroid 1999 JU3 in July 2018.

The second in the Hayabusa asteroid explorer series, Hayabusa2 uses technology based on the successful Hayabusa mission launched in 2010. Equipped with ion thrusters, the unmanned probe is headed for JU3, which it will study with a variety of instruments in the hopes of learning more about the origins of the Solar System and recovering organic materials from the asteroid's interior.

Aside from the usual imagers and spectroscopes, JAXA says that Hayabusa2 will be taking a more direct approach toward asteroid studies. Like its predecessor, Hayabusa2 has a probe with a sample grabber, which it will use to collect pieces of the asteroid's surface. These will be transferred to a reentry vehicle and fired back into the Earth's atmosphere when the asteroid explorer returns home after completing its 18-month stay at JU3.