[meteorite-list] After Long Trek, Unsung Japanese Spacecraft Nears Asteroid Target (Hayabusa)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Sep 6 14:52:05 2005
Message-ID: <200509061813.j86IDbu29814_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/asteroid-05i.html

After Long Trek, Unsung Japanese Spacecraft Nears Asteroid Target
by Richard Ingham
AFP
September 6, 2005

Cambridge, England (AFP) - Rivals from the United States and Europe get
the bigger headlines and bigger budgets, but a little-noticed Japanese
mission to a distant space rock may scoop them all.

Launched to the world's near-total indifference on May 9 2003, the
little probe Hayabusa ("Falcon") is now on the brink of rendezvousing
with a 630-metre (yard) asteroid on a mission that could prove historic.

If all goes well, Hayabusa will be the first spacecraft to bring home
raw material from an asteroid, part of the primeval rubble left over
from the making of the Solar System.

"It is an utterly remarkable project which has been given almost little
coverage in the media," Patrick Michel, a French astrophysicist who is
involved in the mission, told AFP on Monday at a meeting of astronomers
here.

"Understanding the chemical composition of asteroids will help us to
understand how the planets were made. But the only asteroids we see on
Earth are as scorched remains, as meteorites, not the raw substance itself."

Hayabusa, driven by an ion engine, a slow-but-steady form of propulsion
which leaves maximum volume for scientific instruments, is now just 750
kilometers (475 miles) from the asteroid Itokawa, the mission website
(www.jaxa.jp) of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), said
on Monday

In November comes the white-knuckle part of the mission, said Michel,
who works at the Cote d'Azur Observatory in southern France and with the
French National Centre for Space Research (CNRS).

Hayabusa will gingerly manoeuvre itself to within a few metres (yards)
of Itokawa and then fire a projectile weighing about five grammes (1/5th
of an ounce) into the surface at a speed of 300 metres (325 feet) per
second, or around 1,800 kms (1,125 miles) an hour.

If the arithmetic is right and luck is on Hayabusa's side, material will
be kicked out of the asteroid and some of it will shoot up a slender funnel.

The pellets are scheduled to be shot at three different sites in the
asteroid, with each tiny sample being carefully stowed away onboard.

The spacecraft will also deploy a little robot, about the size of a
large beer can, called Minerva, which for a couple of days will "hop"
around the asteroid's surface, taking pictures and measuring the
temperature.

Then it will be time to head for home. In June 2007, Hayabusa's precious
payload, of just 100 milligrammes, should land in the Australian Outback.

The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) have deployed huge
resources on media-friendly missions to analyse comets and other
primitive phenomena.

They include ESA's Rosetta, a one-billion-euro (1.2-billion-dollar)
mission, due to climax in 2014, to deploy a robot lab on a comet and
analyse its soil and transmit the data back home.

In its Deep Impact mission, the United States fired a metal projectile
into a comet last July, using remote sensors to analyse the gas and dust
spewed out by the impact.

Another US craft, Stardust, is due to return next year with material
scooped by flying through the wake of a comet.

And it sent a spacecraft, Genesis, to capture samples of the solar wind.
The craft crashed into the Utah desert in September 2004, but some of
its samples were saved.

"I'm going to be thrilled if the Japanese do this. I wish them all of
the luck in the world," Carey Lisse, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins
University in Maryland and a member of the Deep Impact science team.

"With all these missions, we're going to have a revolution in our
understanding of these first bodies that formed the Solar System."
Received on Tue 06 Sep 2005 02:13:33 PM PDT