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Future of Hayabusa Asteroid Probe Looks Bleak
mj_1903 writes "After landing, then not landing, then potentially landing on an asteroid it appears as though the Japanese spacecraft may have collected specimens of the asteroid. Unfortunately a host of problems is continuing to plague it including a lack of fuel, a shutdown of part of the chemical orientation system, a complete failure of the flywheels and communication issues. The Japanese team are however not giving up on it and are still hopeful that they can return it to the earth in June of 2007."
Whatever you might say about this mission, it certainly is exciting. I can't recall any other with such a level of failures and malfunctions, yet still with a hope, if at this point slim, of succeeding (Maybe SOHO has had an equal number of near death experiences over a much longer time span).
Hayabusa was a very innovative and daring mission. I think it bodes well for Japanese planetary missions in the future. But they really made a mess of the mission operationally. It seemed to me the planning showed lower proficiency than US missions. Expect them to improve.
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You must be kidding.
Check out the record for probes to Mars over the last several decades, between the USSR/Russia and the USA. By such measures, the people of most countries aren't so smart compared to what the universe throws at us as challenges.
Perhaps the most humbling recent example was the Mars Climate Orbiter. Imperial versus metric confusion? Pathetic. The universe is either a pretty unforgiving place, or it has a deep and mean sense of humor.
Hayabusa has done fine. Not great -- it has not met all its ambitious goals -- but fine. The pictures of the asteriod are awesome, and show features greatly different from any other asteroid that has been imaged up close. At the very least, the mission accomplished the goal of orbiting and surveying the asteriod, something which has been done only one time before (the NEAR mission to Eros). Then it took off again, which no mission has ever done.
The people running the mission deserve alot of credit for getting this far despite the hardware problems, and I hope they still manage the goal of getting sample return.
You have to admit, this is a huge technological feat. Think of all the effort that was put into the DARPA grand challenge, right here on Earth, and then think of all the crap that went wrong. To even try to do what the Hayabusa Asteroid Probe has done takes a lot of effort and money. If they only get 50% of it right, that is still a huge accomplishment.
Look at it like this, at least they are not spending their money on trying to figure out ways to stockpile enough munitions to destroy the Earth 4 times over. The chances that they will help uncover information that is *useful* to mankind is quite large... we should be applauding them.
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It's had some serious systems problems -- but the whole idea of these sorts of mission development cycles is that you put together the machines much faster and with (relatively) modern hardware. Used to be you paid a ton for extreme redundancy in your systems, and ended up with much more expensive probes with 10- or 20-year old systems. This is the Spirit and Opportunity model, not the Cassini model. You expect to lose some of your bets that way, but to be able to build and launch faster for much cheaper, and to therefore get more for your cash.
The relative inexperience of the people running the show has been a secondary factor in my book. They've been resourceful once the problems were coming in; it was more the build quality and the basic idea of using unprecedented technology like their (botched at the wrong moment) altimeter system that went bad. The ground controllers are taking some heat, but maybe a little too much, for their attempts to cope with a series of system failures.
Neither one of those is a serious long-term problem. The shorter-build-cycle model isn't going to stop soon, and for every Beagle you get a Spirit-Opportunity success story that makes it worthwhile. I'd bet the Japanese developers try to bite off a little less on the ground in terms of breaking-edge technology next time, and in any case they'll have more experience.
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I think this story might give us a lot more entertainment yet. Quite often in space exploration it's what happens after things go wrong that the really interesting stuff begins. I'm thinking about the engineering solutions to the Apollo13 explosion, the Hubble Space telescope and the problems of the deep space probes like Voyager and Mariner as they encountered difficulties never imagined in their design brief - how a bunch of seriously smart software and electrical engineers stuck in a room with a load of coffee and a white board can turn a disasterous situation around. When a project like this gets effectively written off because the probe is in such bad shape, that's when the engineers get to try out "It's a long shot but it just might work" ideas. I wouldn't bet against the Jap engineers trying some pretty clever stuff to get that probe home - I'm not saying they'll be successful but it could be interesting and entertaining, and we may even learn something from it.
Here are a few numbers, just to illustrate how difficult such missions are.
/. would focus a bit more on the Hayabusa success.
Imagine there are lots of little components in each device of the experiment (space ship) and the probability that each of them works perfectly for the whole missing is 99%, a pretty large number considering the stress on the material etc.. Then let's have only 10 components in each device. There is a 0.99^10=0.9 (90%) probability that each device works without problem. Then assume we installed 10 of the larger devices for our mission. Now the chances of success are only 0.9^10=0.35 (35%). Of course reality is a bit more complex, but this simple model illustrates what the odds are.
By constantly emphasizing the problems of an experiment it is very easy to discredit it. This discord hurts not only the Japanese space program, but also the programs in the EU, India, Russia, and US. It may even be harmful to scientific programs in general. I wish the reports at