First picture taken on the surface of an asteroid

The first picture taken on the surface of an asteroid was snapped by the Japanese HIBOU rover at 02:44 (UTC) on 22 September 2018. It took the picture immediately after landing on the rocky surface of asteroid 162173 Ryugu. The small cylindrical rover was launched from the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 probe.

HIBOU (also known as Rover-1A) was one of a pair of small cylindrical rovers deployed from Hayabusa2's Minerva-II-1 container (the other was called OWL, or Rover-1B). The two identical rovers measure 18 cm (7 in) in diameter and 7 cm (2.75 in) in height, and have a mass of 1.1 kg (2 lb 6 oz). They have been designed to bounce around on the asteroid's surface using the torque from an internal off-centre rotor (an extreme low-gravity implementation of the same effect that causes a phone to scoot across a table when it's on vibrate).

The names of the rovers fit in with the bird of prey theme used for other components of the mission (Hayabusa means "peregrine falcon" in Japanese). Hibou is the French word for horned owl, but the Japanese Space Agency have also asserted that stands for "Highly Intelligent Bouncing Observation Unit".

Pictures have been taken from the surface of comets before, most notably by the European Space Agency's Philae lander (part of the Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko), but not asteroids.