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On the evening of July 5, 2026, a 600-kilogram box of solar panels and instruments zipped past a peanut-shaped rock 450 meters across at roughly five kilometers per second. The flyby lasted about as long as the time it took you to read this sentence. The spacecraft was JAXA's Hayabusa2, on a deliberate dash past near-Earth asteroid 98943 Torifune, also known by its provisional designation 2001 CC21. By the time anyone on Earth saw a single pixel of the encounter, the spacecraft was already several thousand kilometers beyond the asteroid, never to swing back (JAXA, July 6, 2026).

That brevity is the point. Torifune is the first of three asteroid encounters the extended Hayabusa2 mission is supposed to make before the probe reaches its true final target, the tiny 11-meter asteroid 1998 KY26, in 2031. The spacecraft is a sample-return craft that has already done its main job. Every extra maneuver now is rehearsal for an encounter that will be the most technically punishing of the mission (The Planetary Society, July 7, 2026).

Two reasons. First, Torifune is a contact binary, a body made of two lobes stuck together like a snowman, and those shapes are common in the small-body population but hard to study up close. Ground-based radar and adaptive-optics images suggested it was elongated; until last week no spacecraft had ever confirmed the structure with its own camera.

Second, the flyby is a deliberate dress rehearsal for planetary defense. JAXA wanted to demonstrate the kind of precision terminal guidance a kinetic impactor mission like NASA's DART would need, where the spacecraft picks a small, faint, irregularly shaped target and threads a narrow approach corridor without hitting it. Torifune is the right kind of object: small, dim, and only clearly resolved a few days before closest approach. The mission team could not plot the final approach trajectory until the very end, because Torifune is faint enough that its exact orbit was uncertain until then (The Planetary Society, July 7, 2026).

If you are trying to design a spacecraft that bumps a city-block-sized rock off course, this is the kind of practice you want.

Hayabusa2 launched in December 2014 on an H-IIA rocket and arrived at asteroid Ryugu in mid-2018. Over the next eighteen months it dropped a pair of tiny hopping rovers, lowered the German-French MASCOT lander onto the surface, fired a 2-kilogram copper projectile into Ryugu to expose fresh sub-surface material, and scooped up samples. The return capsule landed at Woomera, Australia, in December 2020. Inside, scientists found water-bearing minerals, organic molecules, and grains that had escaped billions of years of space weathering. The samples are still being analyzed and are among the cleanest primitive materials anyone has yet returned from a carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid (Sci.News, July 8, 2026).

Most sample-return missions end there. Hayabusa2 did not. After releasing its sample capsule, the main spacecraft fired its ion engines and began a new trajectory. The extended mission has two goals: a high-speed flyby of Torifune in 2026, two Earth gravity assists in 2027 and 2028, and a final rendezvous with 1998 KY26 in 2031 (ISAS, mission page).

The Torifune encounter happened on July 5 at 18:30 JST, give or take one second. The spacecraft passed about 800 meters from the asteroid's center, well outside the body but close enough that its three imaging instruments could resolve surface detail. ONC-T, the visible-light Optical Navigation Camera, started tracking Torifune on June 20 and continued to use the asteroid as an optical navigation reference right up to closest approach. About an hour before the flyby, the spacecraft also switched on NIRS3, a near-infrared spectrometer that hunts for water and hydroxyl signatures; TIR, a thermal infrared imager; and LIDAR, which bounces a laser off the surface to measure distance (JAXA, July 6, 2026).

Closest approach came and went. Hayabusa2 could not look back. JAXA confirmed the spacecraft was healthy at 18:35 JST, five minutes after the flyby, and the first images and thermal maps arrived within a day (Sky & Telescope, July 6, 2026).

The visible-light image showed what ground-based observers had suspected. Torifune is two distinct lobes joined at a narrow neck, the textbook shape of a contact binary formed when two smaller asteroids collided gently and stuck rather than bouncing apart. At about 450 meters across, it is in the same size class as the near-Earth asteroid Apophis and roughly an order of magnitude larger than the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013 (The Planetary Society, July 7, 2026).

The naming fits. JAXA chose "Torifune" through a public contest; it is short for Ame-no-Torifune, a Japanese deity associated with safe, steady, high-speed travel. You can see why the mission team liked it.

A flyby at five kilometers per second does not leave much margin for error. A small miscalculation in the closest-approach distance translates into several hundred meters of horizontal miss, easily enough to fly by the wrong side of the asteroid. There is no second chance. Hayabusa2 had to arrive at a precise point in space at a precise time, then keep going.

The spacecraft used a hybrid optical and radio navigation scheme. ONC-T took repeated images of Torifune against the background star field, and the team on the ground measured the asteroid's apparent position to refine the predicted encounter point. Combined with deep-space network Doppler and ranging data, this let mission control update the trajectory within the last few days before closest approach. JAXA has not published the final navigation error budget, but the fact that ONC-T returned sharply focused images from 800 meters suggests the geometry worked (JAXA, July 6, 2026).

The thermal imager, TIR, observed Torifune in the 8 to 12 micrometer band, the thermal infrared where a sunlit asteroid radiates most of its heat. The brightness temperature, divided by the solar illumination, lets you back out the surface's thermal inertia, a property set by regolith grain size, packing, and whether the surface is bare rock or blanketed in dust. For a small contact binary, the thermal data is the only way to learn what the surface is made of, because visible and near-infrared spectroscopy during a flyby captures too little reflected sunlight to break out mineral absorption signatures cleanly.

LIDAR is simpler but just as important. It rangefinds the surface with a 1.064-micrometer pulsed YAG laser, accurate from 30 meters out to 25 kilometers. During the Torifune encounter it produced a continuous altitude profile in the final minutes before closest approach, doubling as both a navigation input and a shape model. Combined with the ONC-T silhouette from a known viewing angle, the LIDAR track pins down the asteroid's three-dimensional shape far better than the optical images alone (JAXA, July 6, 2026).

The instrument suite is what the spacecraft will carry into the 1998 KY26 encounter in 2031. KY26 is a different problem. At roughly 11 meters across, it is small enough that Hayabusa2 will not simply fly past; the extended mission plan calls for an actual orbit insertion and an attempted landing. The asteroid's rapid rotation period, on the order of a few minutes, will make that landing extremely difficult, and the extended mission team is using Torifune to validate the optical and thermal mapping pipeline they will need for the harder job.

Hayabusa2 has now visited three asteroids across two missions. The first primary mission gave the world its best sample of a carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid. The extended mission is a chain of progressively harder technical demonstrations, and the Torifune flyby is the one with the lowest stakes but the cleanest test of the navigation approach JAXA wants to use in 2031. More data will downlink over the coming weeks.

Two years from now, the spacecraft will swing past Earth for a gravity assist. Three years after that, in 2031, it will arrive at a rock smaller than a house and try to land on it. Last week's flyby is the first of the milestones the extended mission still owes the public. JAXA hit the geometry and returned a clean, recognizable image. The data will inform how we eventually deflect a real asteroid.

Abstract

The blogpost explores relativistic effects on proof-of-work based cryptocurrency protocols. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay and it is quite plausible that future human colonists spread across the solar system and beyond will use a decentralized cryptocurrency as opposed to a fiat currency issued by a central authority. The low transaction fees, the ubiquitous access, not being bound by exchange rates or interest rates, not being controlled by financial institutions who are serving foreign interests -- these are some of the advantages cryptocurrencies will enjoy in the thriving exo-economy.

Motivation

At present, on a cryptocurrency network, the information exchanged by the nodes in the network reaches each node almost instantaneously. The speed at which the TCP/IP packets travel on the network and the fact that the Internet spans only the Earth and the LEO makes this possible. However, once the region the network is spread across will reach certain boundaries, the network size would have negative impact on the network: increasing communication failures due to network delays, more frequent and longer blockchain forks as part of the proof-of-work protocol, network segregation into local sub-networks (let us call them topological forks), just to name a few.

Nullius in verba... as they say. Let's go deeper into details and figure out a feasible solution for a truly interplanetary cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency 101

You can think of a cryptocurrency as a digital money ecosystem. Plain and simple. A collection of technologies are part of this ecosystem, all of them the result of years of research in the cryptography and distributed systems fields: a decentralized network of computers, a public transaction ledger -- also known as a blockchain, a protocol that consists of a set of rules for transaction validation, a decentralized consensus mechanism. [ANTO]

A decentralized network of computers ensures the resilience of the network. We can think of both computing power and data storage capabilities. As the computing power is distributed across the network, any disruption can be successfully handled by the network. Transaction data resides on all nodes of the network. This implies that even physical damage done to network nodes will not take out the network.

The blockchain is a public distributed ledger which stores all transactions handled by the network. As the name suggests, the blockchain is a list of data blocks. Each of these blocks contains a set of transactions, as many as can fit in the block, given the maximum size of the block (a characteristic of the network). Transactions contain sender and receiver info, and the amount/asset that is changing ownership, and they are broadcasted and added to blocks by network nodes. Blocks are linked to the previous block in the chain by a cryptographic hash (the hash of the previous block becomes part of the current block). This backward link leads all the way to the first block in the chain, the Genesis block. Each cryptocurrency blockchain has one. The cryptographic hashes have an important role in protecting the blockchain from tampering attempts.

The transaction validation rules enforced by the nodes in the network ensure that the content of each block in the blockchain is valid. By far, the most frequent form of fraud is double spending. The validation process makes sure that the inputs on the transactions exist and that they have not been already spent. The transactions marked as invalid are rejected by the network and do not make it on the blockchain.

The consensus mechanism is designed so that all the nodes in the network can agree on the set of transactions to be included in the current block. It shifts the authority and the credibility required by a central clearing house to a network of nodes. Important to mention here that, inherently, the nodes do not trust each other, and they do not have to because the trust is enforced by the consensus mechanism itself.

The Proof-of-Work

We mentioned above that one of the key innovations that make cryptocurrencies possible is the decentralized consensus mechanism. Currently, the de facto consensus mechanism is the proof-of-work.

The proof-of-work consensus mechanism was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 [NAKA]. In general, a proof-of-work is a piece of data that requires costly and time consuming computational effort, but it is very easy to verify. A very good analogy is one of your semester projects in college... it takes you a whole semester to finalize it, but it takes very little time and effort for your supervisor to evaluate and grade it. Similarly, proof-of-work is used by cryptocurrencies for block generation. For the network to accept the block, nodes must complete a proof-of-work which also guarantees the integrity of the transactions included in the block. The difficulty of the proof-of-work is adjusted by the network so that a new block can be generated every fixed time interval. This fixed time interval is characteristic to every cryptocurrency. Most notably, for Bitcoin this time interval is set to 10 minutes.

Satoshi Nakamoto's solution, emobodied by the proof-of-work algorithm above, achieves consensus on the network without a central trusted authority (hence the name decentralized consensus mechanism).

Enter the Ansible

For the astute reader, it is quite obvious at this point that communication delays between the network nodes have a direct effect on the protocol described above. An important assumption made when the protocol was designed is that these delays are small, and this is why they can be handled by the network when the nodes choose to follow and validate the blocks on the longest blockchain fork. Also, this is the reason why all the nodes in the network can have a say in the network consensus. They all can find a solution for the current block, and they all can be rewarded when they find the solution. The communication delays witnessed by the peripheral nodes will cripple their ability to find solutions and these nodes will not be incentivized to remain in the network. Hence, the segregation of the network effect mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, given the current technological level of our civilization, we do not have at our disposal a technology that allows us to communicate fast and reliable over the large expanse of space. It would take a hell of a wait time to proces a payment made by a mining corporation in the TRAPPIST-1 system, 12 parsecs within the constellation of Aquarius, to a planetary engineering corporation located in the Sol system... twice 39 years plus the block confirmation time.

Fortunately, the Sci-Fi literature already offers a solution for our problem. For those of you, Sci-Fi nerds like myself, that have already read Rocannon's World [LEGU] and Ender's Game [CARD], the Ansible device must sound very familiar. The ansible is a fictional device capable of faster-than-light communication. To word this differently, an operator of such device can send and receive messages to and from another device over any distance with no delay.

Hence, even if only in the realm of science fiction, we will be able to devise a solution for the problem that the future cryptocurrency enthusiasts, living in the outer space colonies, will eventually face.

The Special Relativity Theorem

Before elaborating more on a required upgrade of the network protocol, we have to discuss the special relativity theorem and its implications on how time and distance are perceived in reference systems.

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He received it for his contributions to the understanding of the photoelectric effect, after publishing a paper on it in 1905. At that point his contributions to the understanding of gravity through his theory of relativity were well known, but the new perspective on gravity offered by Einstein's theory was so controversial that the Nobel Prize Committee members chose to protect their reputation. They decided that it was appropriate to award Einstein the Nobel Prize for "his services to theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

During his research Einstein attempted to reconcile the principle of relativity with the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light. This attempt led Einstein to the discovery of the special relativity theorem. Einstein's Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) with a test subject travelling by train is very well known in the scientific community. If our human subject is walking towards the front of the train with velocity w with respect to the train, and the train is moving with velocity v with respect to the embankment, then an observer on the embankment will measure as W = v + w the velocity of our subject on the train. If instead of our traveller, we consider a beam of light propagating with velocity c, the velocity measured by the observer on the embarkment would be v + c. However, this violates the principle that the velocity of light is constant in any inertial reference system and equal with c. Einstein found a solution for this problem and thus resolved the incompatibility.

One direct consequence of the special relativity theorem is the Lorentz transformation.

Before the relativity theorem, time in physics had an absolute significance, independent of the state of motion of the reference system. However, every inertial reference system has its own particular time. We always have to be told which inertial reference system the statement of time refers to. If you look at your watch, the time you read is the time as measured in the Earth inertial reference system. By the way, the Earth circles the Sun on an almost circular orbit, which means that any body maintaining a constant position in the Earth reference system should experience some centripetal force. However, this centripetal component is negligible compared to the gravitational pull of the Earth. Hence, engineers use this aproximation when calculating satellite orbits.

Back to our original trail of thoughts... the axiom that lays the foundation for the Lorentz transformation states that every ray of light possesses the velocity of transmission c relative to any inertial reference system. That is the velocity of transmission in vacuo (in a vacuum).

If following Einstein's thought experiments [EINS], the above-mentioned axiom leads to a set of four equations that explain the relation between dimensional and temporal coordinates in two inertial reference systems:

  x' = (x - vt)/sqr(1 - v²/c²)
  y' = y
  z' = z
  t' = (t - x*v/c²)/sqr(1 - v²/c²)

where:

 x, y, z, t coordinates in inertial reference system K,
 x', y', z' , t' coordinates in inertial reference system K',
 v the relative velocity between inertial reference systems;

also, the expression 1//sqr(1 - v²/c²) is known as the Lorentz factor.

The Lorentz transformation equations are a more general case of the Galilean transformation:

  x' = x - vt
  y' = y
  z' = z
  t' = t

which is the basis of the assumptions of the classical mechanics as to the absolute character of both dimensional and temporal coordinates. The above are the result of replacing velocity c with ∞ in the Lorentz transformation equations.

The Lorentz transformation has a few corollaries which have an impact on time dilation, length contraction, relativistic mass, relativistic momentum, and relativistic kinetic energy. The one that concerns us is the time dilation corollary:

 Δt = γΔt'
 
where γ is defined by

 α = 1/γ = sqr(1 - v²/c²)

Assuming a clock at rest in inertial reference system K, and moving with the velocity v in the inertial reference system K', the time Δt' between two ticks as measured in the frame K' is longer than the time Δt between the same ticks as measured in the rest frame of the clock, K.

Relativistic Effects on Proof-of-Work

To better understand the relativistic effects on how relative time is perceived in two inertial reference systems (or Galilean reference systems [EINS]) we have to mention the twin paradox. The twin paradox is a thought experiment that involves two identical twins. One of the twins makes a journey into space onboard a relativistic spaceship, and upon his return to Earth discovers that his twin has aged much more than he did. Depending on how fast the spaceship moves through space and/or how long the journey was, our traveller could return to Earth and realize that several generations have passed meanwhile.

As a direct application of the twin paradox, we have Mazer Rackham, International Fleet Admiral and Ender Wiggin's mentor, as portrayed by Orson Scott Card [CARD]. The fighter pilot who destroyed the Formic Fleet Flagship, killed the Hive Queen, and ended the Second Formic Invasion, Mazer Rackham is sent on a journey on a relativistic spaceship and returns to Earth 100 years later in order to assist the International Fleet. Upon his return he has barely aged a few years.

Similarly, if a subnetwork is moving relative to the rest of the network, the nodes in the subnetwork would experience time dilation as predicted by the special relativity theorem. Hence, they are at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the nodes because they have less time available to find a solution for the proof-of-work problem. In order to make thing square for all the nodes in the network, the difficulty of the problem should be adjusted in each subnetwork using the Lorentz factor: in order to compensate for time dilation, the relativistic nodes should have to solve a simpler problem. Also, their block confirmation time should decrease as well.

One element is missing still... how do ansibles synchronize? What value has the Lorentz factor for each one of them? One simple solution for this problem is having one of the ansibles (let us say the Earth-bound one) broadcasting a beacon every fixed number of seconds. The ansibles interfacing to subnetworks would pick up the broadcast, and by measuring the time interval between the beacons, infer the Lorentz factor. Once the Lorentz factor is determined, the nodes mining on the subnetworks will have their proof-of-work difficulty and the block confirmation time adjusted accordingly.

A more Down-to-Earth Solution for the Problem

We will fork the storyline (pun intended) at Enter the Ansible paragraph, and suggest a more down-to-earth solution for the problem. The peripheral nodes are not to participate in the consensus. Their function would be just to relay messages (a.k.a. payment information) across the network. In our multi-planetary scenario, the nodes working on the proof-of-work would reside on/around the Earth, and the network nodes on Mars or any other region in the Sol system would have to wait 2x (network packets travel time) + (block confirmation time) in order to confirm a payment. However, such a solution would have an Achilles heel very hard to defend... if starting its mining engine, any peripheral node could take over the local network and force a topological fork of the network. For a node, the incentive of staying honest on the current network must be stronger than any reward obtained by cheating.

Concluding remarks

While the blogpost contains some elements of fiction, it accurately describes the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the special relativity theorem, the Lorentz transformation and its corollaries. We would like to thank the readers that went through this exercise with us. Undeniably, cryptocurrencies are disrupting the global economy and they are here to stay. Undeniably, we -- as a species -- will explore and migrate farther than the LEO. History has taught us that decentralization is the key to survival and prosperity. Let us together make the future happen.

References

[ANTO] Antonopoulos, Andreas M., Mastering Bitcoin, Second Edition, O'Reilly Media, Inc., June 2017;
[CARD] Card, Orson Scott, Ender's Game, A Tor Teen Book, 2014;
[EINS] Einstein, Albert, Relativity, The Special and the General Theory, Princeton University Press, 2015;
[LEGU] Le Guin, Ursula K., Rocannon's World, Harper & Row, 1977;
[NAKA] Nakamoto, Satoshi, Bitcoin - A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, www.bitcoin.org, 2008;