Ryugu in 3D — Explore the ~0.5 m/px NASA Map | Humanity Stats
asteroid · orbits Sun
Ryugu
A 900-metre rubble pile that has been brought back to Earth in a jar.
Hayabusa2 ONC-T
—
57.2/100 · Severe
Escape velocity
0.4 m/s
Walking briskly would launch you into space. Everything on the surface, including a lander, has to be actively held down.
Surface conditions on Ryugu
Every figure below is tagged with where it came from. Measured means an instrument read it on or at the body; modeled means it was computed and never directly observed.
GravityMeasured
0.00 m/s2
0.000 g
Mean temperatureMeasured
-27 °C
-63 to 100 °C
Surface pressureMeasured
Vacuum
None
RadiationModeled
0.700 mSv/day
Unshielded interplanetary GCR near 1 AU
Solar fluxModeled
960 W/m2
0.71x Earth
Day / night cycleMeasured
7.6 h
Hayabusa2 imaging
Water
None
Travel timeMeasured
3.6 years
Hayabusa2, Dec 2014 to Jun 2018
Delta-v from LEOModeled
5.2 km/s
Near-Earth asteroid rendezvous — cheaper to reach than the lunar surface
Radius
0.448 km
0.000x Earth
What it would take to settle Ryugu
No world off Earth is habitable — the honest habitable fraction of every surface here is zero. What can be answered is how far each one sits from Earth along the seven axes a habitat has to buy its way out of. Ryugu scores 57.2 out of 100, on 100% coverage of the axes.
Radiation30
Pressure100
Temperature10
Gravity98
Water100
Available energy7
Access49
Pressure
Vacuum
Below the Armstrong limit (0.062 bar) body fluids boil at body temperature — the difference between needing a mask and needing a pressure vessel.
Gravity
0.00 m/s2 — 0.000 g
Nobody has ever measured long-term human health at any gravity between 0 and 1 g. Below about 0.1 g, anchoring anything — including yourself — becomes the design driver.
Water
None
Water is drinking water, breathing oxygen and rocket propellant in one deposit. A world without it has to import all three forever.
Access
5.2 km/s from LEO, 3.6 years one way
Delta-v sets what a launch costs; cruise time sets how much consumable, shielding and crew patience each kilogram of payload drags with it.
Who has been to Ryugu
Human landings
0
People who walked
0
Robotic landings
4
Named features
13
Hayabusa2 touched down twice, dropped two MINERVA-II rovers and the MASCOT lander, blew a crater in it with a copper impactor, and flew 5.4 grams of it home in December 2020.
Unprotected survival: Seconds. You would also have to be careful not to jump off.
Water
No ice, but the returned samples are 7% water by mass, locked in hydrated clays — plus amino acids, making Ryugu direct evidence for how water reached Earth.
The named places on Ryugu
The IAU has approved 13 names on Ryugu, each drawn from a theme the naming committee chose for this world. Every name in the scene above is one of them, placed at its catalogued coordinates.
Ryujin DorsumDorsum3.2 kmâDragon godâ, sea ruler in Japanese fairy tale, father of princess Otohime, master of the undersea Ryugu Palace where fisherman Urashima Taro was a guest.
Tokoyo FossaFossa0.6 kmImmortal world of Japanese mythology, eternal, timeless land across the sea or undersea kingdom, where the princess Otohime lives in the fairy tale about the fisherman Urashima.
UrashimaCrater0.3 kmUrashima Taro; fisherman in Japanese fairy tale who rescued a turtle and traveled on its back to the dragon Ryujinâs undersea Ryugu Palace, where he was welcomed by princess Otohime.
Horai FossaFossa0.3 kmMythical Mount Horai (Penglai in Chinese), paradise of the immortals; in some versions of the Japanese fairy tale about fisherman Urashima is located in the sea on the shell of tortoise that princess Otohime has turned into.
CendrillonCrater0.2 kmProtagonist of a fairy tale Cendrillon by French writer Charles Perrault (1697), also known as Cinderella.
KintaroCrater0.2 kmâGolden Boyâ in Japanese fairy tale, who grew up in the wild forests of Mount Ashigara and had a superhuman strength.
KolobokCrater0.2 kmSmall ball-like bun, which ran away from home and rolled on the road, singing his tricky song; protagonist of a Russian fairy tale.
MomotaroCrater0.2 kmâPeach Boyâ in Japanese fairy tale, who came to Earth inside a giant peach and once undertook a journey to fight horned ogres in a distant island.
Imagery is public-domain NASA/USGS mission data, streamed live from NASA Trek as a plate-carrée tile pyramid and draped on our own sphere — no third-party globe library and no cached copy of anyone else's map.
