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Hayabusa Earth Flyby Swings Toward Asteroid
An anonymous reader writes "As the first of its kind to return asteroid samples to Earth, the Japanese Hayabusa mission took pictures this week during its successful Earth flyby. Eventually headed to the asteroid belt, the probe will feature a novel sample collection 'horn' which hops around on the asteroid's surface and lands intermittently for only a second at a time. The samples will be dust clouds fired up from repeated bullet impacts, since the asteroid's low gravity makes it difficult to 'land' on. When faced with a similar problem, the European Rosetta mission alternatively will harpoon the surface to hang on while also touching down on another small-mass asteroid."
Check out this awesome photo of the Moon and Earth together, taken by Galileo more than a decade ago during its Earth flyby.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
I'm surprised I never heard of this project before! It's a great idea - astroids contain various minerals that can be used to trace the evolution of the solar system. Of course we have some access to this info from the odd meteorite, but I would guess that rock from the astroid belt will be more "pristine".
... ranges in size from dust particles to rock chunks as big as Alaska.
The only drawback I see for this project is that it is only going to sample the surface of the asteroid, which is the region most exposed to cosmic radiation, cratering, and accumulated dust. Naturally there is still something to be learned from that, but I hope this is just a prelude to a more advanced mission to bore larger samples from the asteroides. I imagine that the difficulties in doing that come mostly from stabilizing the spacecraft, given that it's likely the asteroids are actually loosely bound collections of the rubble left over from previous collisions. Of course, if they're not, that would be interesting too.
And slightly off topic - I think this comparison is funny:
The material in the belt
Exactly how do you compare a large, roughly spherical mass to "the size of Alaska"? Maybe they mean the surface area is the same? The surface area of Alaska is about 1.5 million km-squared; the surface area of Ceres, the largest asteroid, is about 11 million km-squared - that's more like the total area of the US (9.6 million km-squared)!
Or maybe they meant to compare the radii? If Alaska were circular, it would have a radius of 690 km. The radius of Ceres is 466 km. Interestingly, a better comparison in this case would be the size of France (effective radius of 420 km), and France is of course the international standard for measuring astronomical objects... Did you know that the base of Olympus Mons is also about the size of France?