Space Sci Rev DOI 10.1007/s11214-016-0263-2 The Camera of the MASCOT Asteroid Lander on Board Hayabusa 2 R. Jaumann 1,2 · N. Schmitz 1 · A. Koncz 1 · H. Michaelis 1 · S.E. Schroeder 1 · S. Mottola 1 · F. Trauthan 1 · H. Hoffmann 1 · T. Roatsch 1 · D. Jobs 1 · J. Kachlicki 1 · B. Pforte 1 · R. Terzer 1 · M. Tschentscher 1 · S. Weisse 1 · U. Mueller 1 · L. Perez-Prieto 3 · B. Broll 3 · A. Kruselburger 3 · T.-M. Ho 4 · J. Biele 5 · S. Ulamec 5 · C. Krause 5 · M. Grott 1 · J.-P. Bibring 6 · S. Watanabe 7 · S. Sugita 8 · T. Okada 9 · M. Yoshikawa 9 · H. Yabuta 10 Received: 28 August 2015 / Accepted: 2 June 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract The MASCOT Camera (MasCam) is part of the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander’s science payload. MASCOT has been launched to asteroid (162173) Ryugu onboard JAXA’sHayabusa 2 asteroid sample return mission on Dec 3rd, 2014. It is scheduled to arrive at Ryugu in 2018, and return samples to Earth by 2020. MasCam was designed and built by DLR’s Institute of Planetary Research, together with Airbus-DS Ger- many. The scientific goals of the MasCam investigation are to provide ground truth for the orbiter’s remote sensing observations, provide context for measurements by the other lander instruments (radiometer, spectrometer and magnetometer), the orbiter sampling experiment, and characterize the geological context, compositional variations and physical properties of the surface (e.g. rock and regolith particle size distributions). During daytime, clear filter images will be acquired. During night, illumination of the dark surface is performed by an LED array, equipped with 4 × 36 monochromatic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) work- ing in four spectral bands. Color imaging will allow the identification of spectrally distinct surface units. Continued imaging during the surface mission phase and the acquisition of image series at different sun angles over the course of an asteroid day will contribute to the physical characterization of the surface and also allow the investigation of time-dependent B R. Jaumann ralf.jaumann@dlr.de 1 DLR, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, Germany 2 Freie Univ. Berlin, Inst. of Geosciences, Berlin, Germany 3 Airbus DS, Munich, Germany 4 DLR, Institute of Space Systems, Bremen, Germany 5 DLR-MUSC, Linder Höhe, Cologne, Germany 6 Univ. de Paris Sud-Orsay, IAS, Orsay, France 7 Dep. of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Nagoya Univ. Furo-cho Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Japan 8 Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan 9 JSPEC/JAXA, Yoshinodai, Chuo, Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan 10 Dept. of Earth and Space Science, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan