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Japan's Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Reaches 'Spinning-Top' Space Rock Ryugu (space.com)
Zorro shares a report from Space.com: The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 has successfully rendezvoused with Ryugu, beginning an 18-month stay at the diamond-shaped asteroid. Launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, in 2014, the probe will poke, prod and even impact the asteroid, deploying a small lander and three rovers. It will then blast an artificial crater to analyze material below the asteroid's surface. After that, the probe will head back to Earth, arriving near the end of 2020 with samples in tow.
Hayabusa2 automatically fired its thrusters this morning (June 27) at 9:35 a.m. local Japanese time (8:45 p.m. on June 26 EDT, or 1245 GMT), bringing the probe within a constant 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the asteroid, according to a statement from JAXA. The Hayabusa2 team will have to select the best place for the probe's lander and rovers based on the space rock's spinning-top-like shape and its rotation; the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid rotates perpendicular to its orbit, completing a full rotation every 7.5 hours.
Hayabusa2 automatically fired its thrusters this morning (June 27) at 9:35 a.m. local Japanese time (8:45 p.m. on June 26 EDT, or 1245 GMT), bringing the probe within a constant 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the asteroid, according to a statement from JAXA. The Hayabusa2 team will have to select the best place for the probe's lander and rovers based on the space rock's spinning-top-like shape and its rotation; the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid rotates perpendicular to its orbit, completing a full rotation every 7.5 hours.
Speaking of the Philae mission, I hope the Japanese have the dress code for their mission sorted out. Wouldn’t want a repeat of that failure.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Better late then never I suppose. I've already seen this, posted it on Facebook and forgot about it days ago
A few years ago, a Japanese probe missed Venus, an however easier target...
What about the Mars orbiter that mixed up metric/imperial and thrust itself into the planet instead of going around it? How amateur was that?
(and what sort of country still uses imperial units in the 21st century?)
No sig today...
(and what sort of country still uses imperial units in the 21st century?)
Hint: a country more and more secluded, thanks to harsh immigration measures, tougher tariffs and more arrogant behavior.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I, on the other hand, am hoping that all of the Hayabusa researchers wear that same Hawaiian shirt at the press conference. Japan does science, and it doesn't give a fsck what SJWs think about a subject they know nothing about.
What about the Mars orbiter that mixed up metric/imperial and thrust itself into the planet instead of going around it? How amateur was that?
What people don't realize about that particular fusterclck is that it was not caused by someone making a gross error in converting between units. But because science operates in SI while the military contractors who built the probe work in Imperial, months of high-precision conversions back and forth between systems, in software, caused an accumulation of tiny roundoff errors to add up to aerobraking into the wrong part of the Martian atmosphere and loss of the craft.
Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost because of a metric/imperical mix-up as the press likes to portray it. It was lost because one lazy person didn't write down the units on a printout of numbers, and another lazy person just assumed what the units were supposed to be instead of picking up the phone and verifying. MCO would've been lost all the same if the numbers had been printed in kilonewtons and the person keying in the numbers assumed they were newtons. No Imperial units necessary. The first thing they drilled into our heads in my undergrad engineering school was that a number without a unit was meaningless (except as a ratio), and to treat it as NaN rather than assume the units.
Roughly half the missions to Mars fail, and NASA has had the highest success rate of any space agency. The overall success rate at Venus is higher, but mostly because only the Soviets tried to land on it. Everything else has been orbiters or flybys. However, contrary to GP's claim, Venus is a harder target than this asteroid. Because of the sun's gravity well, the least-energy Hohmann transfer orbit from Earth to Venus ends up taking about 6 months. This results in a relatively large delta-V between the spacecraft and target, which needs to be precisely canceled out when the spacecraft reaches Venus in order for it to enter planetary orbit (the same operation which doomed MCO). The asteroid Hyabusa2 is encountering is a near-earth asteroid, meaning its orbital velocity around the sun is not that different from Earth's. So the spacecraft could take a more leisurely trip there (roughly 3.5 years), requiring substantially less delta-V to slow down and match the asteroid's orbit.