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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."
Your father has been killed in a duel with an asteroid and you are given his magic horn to avenge his death. Press start to play!
(Note for the people who don't get the reference, Hayabusa was the last name of the Ninja in the Ninja Gaiden games)
Hayabusa, which is Japanese for "falcon", will act much like its namesake, descending to the asteroid's surface, capturing its prey and returning it to Earth.
Presumably it'll let go of it before coming back? otherwise it'll be the biggest space sample ever collected.
Photographing everything in sight.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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."
The article has an artist's impression of Muses-C doing its thing. Takes me back to the old books I used to read that were full of airbrush pictures - artist's impressions of futuristic space missions. There's something inspiring about that style that computer graphics have never been able to replicate.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Taking off from Kagoshima in southern Japan on its 22 month outbound trip, the Muses-C space probe is scheduled to visit the 1998 SF36 asteroid, 186 million miles from Earth, and bring back a single gram of rock in four years' time.
I bet on the street you could get at least 100 bones for that gram rock.
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?
"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."
-NOW- who's weaponizing space? Looks like the Japanese and Europeans. This is a threat to our national security! We have a space harpoon capability gap! Mr.President, we recommend making a space harpoon that is two times bigger than the european's space harpoon... to deter them from attacking more asteroids.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix