Just weeks after successfully acquiring a sample of surface material on the small, primitive near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, the Japanese HAYABUSA-2 space mission again succeeded in a novel and difficult maneuver. After due preparation, the spacecraft on April 5 successfully deployed an explosive package to the surface of the asteroid from a safe distance of 500 m.

If you haven’t yet visited the Resource Initiative wiki on the ISTVS website, we encourage you to have a look:
» www.istvs.org/resourceinitiative
The mainly technical information is being published to support ISTVS members. We seek feedback and content from members to help guide the development of the Resource Initiative and to take it in directions that best support the aims of the ISTVS.

If you haven’t yet visited the Resource Initiative wiki on the ISTVS website, we encourage you to have a look:
» www.istvs.org/resourceinitiative
The mainly technical information is being published to support ISTVS members. We seek feedback and content from members to help guide the development of the Resource Initiative and to take it in directions that best support the aims of the ISTVS.

Prague Call for Abstracts Extended to April 28// Submissions for Prague Abstracts deadline now extended to April 28. Don’t miss this opportunity to collaborate with terramechanics colleagues in beautiful Prague in September. Full submission details here: Submissions

In our last email Newswire, we reported that after ten years of service, Dr. Lutz Richter had asked to begin the process of stepping down from the position of ISTVS General Secretary.

Now I'm pleased to have the honor of introducing our new General Secretary, Mr. Massimo Martelli.

We thank Dr. Lutz Richter for his contribution to our society as the General Secretary. He was elected as General Secretary at our annual Board of Directors meeting at the 16th ISTVS International Conference in Turin, Italy, in 2008. Since then, he has served ISTVS for more than 10 years.

Dear ISTVS members and readers of the Journal of Terramechanics: Please welcome a new editor who will represent the Asia-Pacific region — Dr. Genya Ishigami. Dr. Ishigami received his PhD degree from Tohoku University, Japan in 2008. He worked as Postdoctoral Associate at the Robotics Mobility Group, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, U.S.A. Dr. Ishigami also served as Research Associate, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

After serving for four years- **Prof. Taizo Kobayashi** would like to resign his editorship of the Journal of Terramechanics. On behalf of the Editorial Board and Advising Board of the Journal, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Kobayashi for his hard work on editing and reviewing manuscripts, promoting the Journal, and maintaining the Journal’s requirements and standards. Thank you, Prof. Kobayashi. We wish you the best with your future endeavors.

In my capacity of the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Terramechanics, I am delighted to introduce Dr. Ramon Gonzalez as a new Editor. Dr. Gonzalez will be helping the Editorial Team to extend classical terramechanics and off-road vehicle mobility to the area of real-time applications, including terrain sensoring, computer-based vision and other techniques for terrain identification and estimation, advanced controls, AI, and geostatistics.

We are happy to share a new book announcement from long-time ISTVS member Bruce Mclaurin.

As a chair of Organizing Committee, I am glad to announce that our Kyoto Conference, APISTVS2018, concluded successfully as total number of registered participants reached 93 and additional 12 accompanying persons.