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Hayabusa To Begin Long Journey Back to Earth
Sparky writes "Japan is planning to set the Hayabusa spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth next month after a delay of more than a year, but it's far from certain that it will get back safely. It was supposed to retrieve asteroid debris, but it's thought that a computer error prevented that from happening. A fuel leak means that its chemical thrusters are out of action, and the craft is relying on its weaker ion engines. The journey back will take 3 years, and the capsule will be on Earth in June 2010 — even if it is empty."
Just sound cool. The Hayabusa is powered by four xenon Ion Engines. It is using xenon ions generated by microwave ECR, and a Carbon / Carbon-composite material for acceleration grid which is resistant to erosion.
They should smash it against a comet. There is nothing to bring back anyway. Why now use it to extract useful spectrum data instead? Especially if they are out of fuel, there will be less noise the organics lines, assuming the standard hydrazine propellant. We already know that ion engines work, what are they trying to show? On the other hand, we know that there are organics in comets but we don't know much more than that. Beside, smashing stuff is always fun.
2010 is the next solar maximum! Who wants to place bets that the nav circuits on this thing get scrambled on its way back!?
If you read the timeline of hayabusa's journey it has just been incredible how many things failed. I mean, practically everything imaginable went wrong with this thing. I wouldn't be surprised if their primary purpose in bringing it back was simply to salvage a modicum of dignity. Seriously. They able to upload and download its software. That should be enough to tell a lot about what was wrong with it. I mean, it's not as if they can't tell probably 90% of what they problems were just through data. I'm guessing they're just bringing it back for the sake of at least being able to claim that they got a spacecraft, that was designed to go somewhere and then come back, to actually come back, even if it didn't fulfill any of the purposes for which its coming back was to be useful.