Slashdot Mirror

Anyone getting the feeling that our (US) partners are starting to doubt our willingness, or far worse, our ability to deliver the lunch? That makes three independant mechanisms for supplying the ISS. I'm starting to think that maybe they just don't trust us (US) anymore. . .

I saw Misuzu Onuki speak at Questacon here in Australia. She was speaking as the representative of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), live from Tokyo as part of the 2004 Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum. The topic was using space technology to better mankind.

Ms. Onuki in particular had an interesting take on things. She spoke about how when people think of space travel they think about high devices like rockets and sattelites, but that a lot of the benefits of space travel will be in changes to the way we live, like with food and clothing and communication. She's really convinced that space travel will help bridge the divide between different cultures as people come together to develop technology and engage in exploration.

What I remember most about the conference though, was after the presentation was over, Natalie Portman walked into the auditorium, right near where I was. She looked surprised, then apologized and said she was in the wrong room. As she turned to walk out her tit almost brushed against my arm and I was sent into a state of such pure ecstasy that music started playing out my ass. It was a flute sonata by Bach.

Nowadays, the main problem with the NASA is that it has lacked serious competiton for the last 25 years. Just like General Motors (GM) and Ford, NASA lost its focus on quality due to the lack of competition.

The tide may be turning. NASA now faces renewed competition from Russia (which is flush with cash from sales of oil and natural gas) and Japan. Just as Honda drove both GM and Ford to improve their products, the Russian space agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will drive NASA to significantly improve its services and products.

After decades of a confused space agenda, the Tokyo combined its 3 independent space agencies into the new JAXA. JAXA's only mission is space supremacy.

Look at the artist's rendition of a future moon base manned by Japanese astronauts.

Nowadays, the main problem with the NASA is that it has lacked serious competiton for the last 25 years. Just like General Motors (GM) and Ford, NASA lost its focus on quality due to the lack of competition.

The tide may be turning. NASA now faces renewed competition from Russia (which is flush with cash from sales of oil and natural gas) and Japan. Just as Honda drove both GM and Ford to improve their products, the Russian space agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will drive NASA to significantly improve its services and products.

After decades of a confused space agenda, the Tokyo combined its 3 independent space agencies into the new JAXA. JAXA's only mission is space supremacy.

Look at the artist's rendition of a future moon base manned by Japanese astronauts.

has a web page offering an artist's rendition of the supersonic jet plane

Just an artist's rendition? How about a video of the prototype taking off instead? :-)

A little bit of mental morphing of the image could transform it into the pre-Federation Enterprise (NX-01). Will the Vulcans make first contact in Tokyo?

Also, I think the replies are AJAX. Woo

I dont know why, but every time I read "AJAX" I always think people are talking about

http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html

go figure?

http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/index.shtml

The ISAS homepage is now claiming
"Hayabusa is sure to have succeeded in asteroid sampling! It found the Target Marker with 880,000 names."

This sounds a bit all-your-base-ish, so I don't know exactly what the second sentence means. In any case, good news! This mission reminds me of Apollo 13 or the Voyagers, with its brillian improvising. They really deserve to get the samples back.

Yes! Habayusa dropped the plaque on the surface of Itokawa. The names of some 880,000 people are micro-etched on aluminum foil on the target marker, which is the bright white spot you can see on the surface of the asteroid. "Highly specific technology for manufacturing microscopic semiconductor was applied for their names etched with so fine prints of alphabet of only 0.03 square millimeters." Try to read about it here. [machine translation] [beta]

That's no moon, look at the symbol in the picture. They have stumbled across the planet of the guardians

...apparently did not deploy its sampling tools, which was kind of the point of the mission. Still, it's a pretty major feat and the article says they might try again, to see if they can get their samples. And check out this great image of the asteroid with the probe's shadow.

Look, a TIE-fighter shadow! (which as everyone knows, is a short-range fighter.)

There is a page of all the technical details, such as the trajectory in the inertial frame and the astroid frame, the Doppler-measured velocity and the integrated distance, laser distance meter, etc. These data clearly indicate that Hayabusa landed on the asteroid, bounced two times, and sat there for 30 minites, and it left the asteroid. It is the first spacecraft that succeeded in landing on a extraterrestrial object other than the moon and leaving it.

...thank you for playing, and there will be some lovely consolation prizes backstage!

At the ISAS web site they have a scorecard for measuring mission success. They seem to have achieved a score of 750 out of a possible 1950. I understand they got some excellent close up photos of the Itokawa asteroid, but the collection and return was where the really big points lay.

Better luck next time, and please do play again! :-)

Hayabusa (MUSES-C) is a Japanese mission. Make that JAXA, not NASA. The mission is paid for in Yen, not Dollar. They launched the probe with an MV-5 rocket, from the Uchinoura Launch Center in Kagoshima.

The official Hayabusa is website is http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/enterp/missions/hayabusa /

Here you can see Minerva (and it's cover) saying "so long and thanks for all the batteries" (In japanese, of course). Also there are pictures of Hayabusa taken from Minerva (first 2)

... with a flight speed 2 times faster than that of current large subsonic transport aircrafts

- flight time less than half on the same route.

in JAXA's home page you can find a video of the launch and some more technical info.

The Chinese are certainly interested in putting men on the moon, however, as is JAXA.

The ESA , on the other hand, is looking to go directly to Mars.

We could do this in a short time frame again, but the projects that we're competing against, namely the Chinese, Japanese, and European, are all operating under longer timescales, making ours the most likely to finish first. Also, the current Lunar exploration budget has been designed to require very little in the way of extra funding. They're cutting out other programs that cost losts of money (read Space Shuttle, ISS, and some exploration missions), but the overall budget is very similar.

For these two reasons, it seems liekly that this will actually work, and that we will land men on the moon again in the very near future.

All hail the Flying Toasters!

It's hard to answer your questions because most of your suppositions are wrong. For instance, the crust of Mars is mostly silicates, just like Earth's.

You need to either go to a local library and check out a book on elementary planetary science or, if you have decent web access, look at some basic astronomy sites. A quick search with Google yields, for example http://spaceinfo.jaxa.jp/note/tansa/e/tan105_mars_ e.html.

A good place to start is wikipedia. For Mars, that would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_(planet).

Those may or may not be the best sites for you, but look around, there is a lot of information available.

"when you take a small mass of radioactive material that gives off lethal amounts of radiation and spread it over a large geographic area you cannot get a lethal exposure. "

It really doesn't work that way. Highly-radioactive chunks of metal of various sizes hit the ground after Cosmos 954 crashed. Several of them could have delivered a lethal dose to a person whio handled them without proper protection.

Here's one reference
And another reference
That talk about the potential lethality of some of the recovered fragments from the satellite. Keep in mind that nobody knows how many of the fragments that hit the ground were actually recovered.

JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has an extensive English-language site. Some good stuff in there.

And what about Japan's adventures in space? Apparently they have a sample return mission en route to the asteroid Itokawa. It's highly interesting because it is a sample return and because it's using an ion engine, yet noone knows about it. Anyway, here's a link.

Earlier this month the Japanesesuccessfully deployed two solar sails.

And the problem is still ongoing. It's not like people are pulling these numbers out of their ass, in 30 years we have managed to take out 15% of all the rain forests in Brazil. That's not opinion, there were 2 million square miles of forest when we started, 85% of it remains. You can see deforestation from space. You can drive along and see where forest was and grazeland, farmland, or (more often) wasteland is today.

The problem is bad enough that Brazil's government is concerned. It is only active law enforcement that keeps commercial interests from denuding the forest at a faster rate. That again, is not opinion of the some nature head. This is from Brazil's own government. You know, the people that live there.