Japanese 'Minerva' Robot Lost in Space

space_weasel writes "A little Japanese robot that was supposed to land on the surface of an asteroid has accidentally been flung into space by its mothership. New Scientist Space reports that the accident occurred as the data link with the spacecraft was being switched from an station in Japan to one in Australia. Mission controllers still plan to punch a hole in the asteroid and collect samples, which will be returned to Earth."

Comments

Re:Warning, Will Robinson

[Anonymous Coward]

sorewa zenbu dokuta sumisu no seda! (frantically)<br>
it'a all dr Smith 's falut!

Re:That's why we need AI in space

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds good, but apparently doesn't work in practice. See DART. People who who work with space stuff are by necessity very VERY conservative since stuff costs so much (of course, things cost so much because everything is endlessly tested and evaluated which costs a small fortune for each piece of electronics on the vehicle, but that's a different story). But regardless, the managers who have to sign off to take the financial responsibility for a vehicle are going to be highly suspicious of an autonomous vehicle given the limited success we've had it in it so far.

Of course, I understand the russians have been doing it for years (Progress Cargo Spacecraft).

Disclaimer: IWARE (i *was* a rocket engineer)

Some pictures

[biraneto2]

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)

Re:High Anxiety

[Tim C]

I'll do it:

average solar radiative power incident at the Earth's surface is 1370W/m^2
radius of the Earth r is 6400km
Assuming the Earth presents essentially a flat disc to the Sun, that gives a total area of pi.r^2=1.3E8m
That gives a total incident power of 1.8E11W
1TW = 1E12W, therefore we have approximately one fifth of a terawatt hitting the Earth's surface. That's a shitload of power, but nowhere near the quoted value.

Even using half the surface area of the Earth rather than the area of the disc it presents only doubles the estimate.

None of that allows for the niggling suspicion that that figure of 1370W may be at Earth's orbital distance, rather than actually incident upon the surface; it's been a long time since I did any Physics though, and I can't be arsed to work it out or look it up.

Re:High Anxiety

[AtomicDevice]

To quote MC Hawking, "the second law is quite specific as to where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise, the earth is not a closed system, it's powered by the sun"