The MicrOmega Investigation Onboard Hayabusa2

MicrOmega is a near-IR hyperspectral microscope designed to characterize in situ the texture and composition of the surface materials of the Hayabusa2 target asteroid. MicrOmega is implemented within the MASCOT lander (Ho et al. in Space Sci. Rev., 2016, this issue, doi:10.1007/s11214-016-0251-6). The spectral range (0.99–3.65 μm) and the spectral sampling ( 20~cm⁻¹ ) of MicrOmega have been chosen to allow the identification of most potential constituent minerals, ices and organics, within each 25 μm pixel of the 3.2× 3.2~mm² FOV. Such an unprecedented characterization will (1) enable the identification of most major and minor phases, including the potential organic phases, and ascribe their mineralogical context, as a critical set of clues to decipher the origin and evolution of this primitive body, and (2) provide the ground truth for the orbital measurements as well as a reference for the analyses later performed on returned samples.