Asteroid recovery

[Roger Ramjet]

Damaged probe set for Woomera, South Australia touchdown

• Brad Crouch
• From: Sunday Mail (SA)
• June 06, 2010
• AN extraordinary space adventure to find the origins of the solar system is about to end, with a pioneering spacecraft scheduled to parachute its precious cargo to Earth after landing on a distant asteroid and scooping up samples of its primordial matter.

Scientists do not expect to find life in the material - and say the risks of contamination are extremely low to non-existent - but they do hope it will give clues to how the solar system formed and evolved.
The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa is hobbling home after a seven-year mission in which it travelled more than four billion kilometres, twice landed on the asteroid Itokawa, broke down, came back to life after two years, and headed home with failed or malfunctioning engines.
Its contents will be isolated and transferred to Japan for analysis to find clues to travelling back through time towards the Big Bang which theoretically created the universe from nothingness.
The deep space probe is due to parachute into the Woomera Prohibited Area at 11.30pm next Sunday - the first time an unmanned spacecraft has rendezvoused with an asteroid, taken soil samples and returned to Earth.The 510kg Hayabusa - the size of a large fridge - blasted off from Japan in May 2003, and, after travelling two billion kilometres, landed on the half-kilometre long Itokawa in November 2005.
Related Coverage

• Hayabusa's journey
• UFO most likely a private rocket Courier Mail, 2 days ago
• Earth's iridium layer making a big impact Adelaide Now, 7 days ago

• Did aliens hijack Voyager? Courier Mail, 13 May 2010
• From outerspace to the Outback Adelaide Now, 21 Apr 2010
• From an asteroid to the Outback Daily Telegraph, 21 Apr 2010

After taking samples and lifting off, the probe had technical difficulties and communications died. After two years of being lost in space, contact was re-established, and Hayabusa fired up its ion engines to return to Earth. But problems in three of its four engines means it is crawling home.
Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency is working with Australian authorities to gently coax Hayabusa towards Woomera, with an alert to aircraft and ships.
Today the spacecraft is about 3 million kilometres from Earth following a gradual process of correcting its trajectory.
Three hours before re-entry on Sunday - 40,000km from Earth - Hayabusa will release its flying saucer-like sample container. When it is about 10km above Woomera a parachute will open and the basketball-sized container will float to a landing, to be urgently located by an automatic beacon and collected. The 18kg container has been granted an import permit, because it is from overseas. The contents will be taken to Japan for analysis.
Witnesses are likely to see little more than a shooting star to signal the start of a Futurama-like era of mining space bodies for science or possibly profit.
Space expert Dr Michael Green, of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, said the mission would increase our understanding of the universe.
"It will be the first time an unmanned spacecraft has gone to an asteroid, collected samples and returned to Earth," he said

[Cujo]

Amazing.

[The Master Cool]

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa is hobbling home after a seven-year mission in which it travelled more than four billion kilometres, twice landed on the asteroid Itokawa, broke down, came back to life after two years, and headed home with failed or malfunctioning engines.

Amazing the developments within 100 yrs of being able to fly.

[mr Fred]

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa is hobbling home after a seven-year mission in which it travelled more than four billion kilometres, twice landed on the asteroid Itokawa, broke down, came back to life after two years, and headed home with failed or malfunctioning engines.

Amazing the developments within 100 yrs of being able to fly.

It's a good job it wasn't a British built thing. British Layland satellite company would have asked them to return it for service after every 5,000 miles

[mr Fred]

Seriously it is pretty smart stuff. Anything like that is seriously interesting.

[Roger Ramjet]

by Junichiro Kawaguchi

Ion engines aboard Hayabusa continue to work well.

The current orbit information is shown in the figures below. They may need some explanation.

When the sample return capsule plunges into the atmosphere, it must fly in the same direction as the Earth rotates so that the entry speed can be lowered. [The rotation speed of the Earth will subtract from the sample return capsule's ballistic entry speed, dramatically reducing the relative speed at which it encounters Earth's atmosphere.] In order to fly in the same direction as Earth rotates, the sample return capsule needs to approach from the night side of the Earth. However, Hayabusa is currently approaching from the day side of the Earth. So the trajectory must be shifted to the opposite side of Earth from its present flight path.

[Now Kawaguchi explains that they have to take great care when they shift Hayabusa's trajectory in this way, because if some problem were to happen with the spacecraft while they were in the middle of shifting the trajectory, they could wind up with Hayabusa and its sample return capsule coming in on a ballistic trajectory toward a populated area of Earth. This possibility must be avoided.] When we move to the other side of Earth, an unintended interruption of the ion engine propulsion has to be taken into account; no instantaneous trajectory shall run cross the Earth disk. So the sophisticated orbit maneuver is devised to fly over the Antarctica on the way.

Continuous ion engine propulsion lasts until the end of March, when Hayabusa will be guided to a tentative target point with respect to the Earth. It is intentionally set very far from the Earth taking guidance error into account, so that Hayabusaavoids inadvertent entry to the atmosphere.

We can control Hayabusa's orientation very well, but we are restricted in how well we can correct the orbit. Hayabusa cannot produce much thrust in the Sunward and anti-Sunward directions. So we must correct the orbit with maneuvers performed mostly in the direction tangential to Hayabusa's orbital motion around the Sun.

As of March 20th, the spacecraft's ion engines have managed to shift Hayabusa's projected closest-approach distance to Earth to a mere 46,000 kilometers. A little more thrusting will see Hayabusa's close-approach point pass within the geosynchronous orbit radius of 42,000 kilometers.
Click to enlarge >
Hayabusa's trajectory as of March 23

[Roger Ramjet]

THE MISSION



The airborne observations.
The Hayabusa Re-Entry MAC airborne observing campaign will deploy a wide range of imaging and spectrographic cameras for remote-sensing observations of the artificial meteor to cover spatial resolution, wavelength, spectral resolution, sensitivity, and time.
Weather won't affect the airborne observations. Hayabusa Re-Entry MAC (for "Multi-instrument Aircraft Campaign") offers an international team of researchers a viewing platform above weather at 39,000 ft, from where atmospheric extinction is low even when the spacecraft is still far away. NASA's DC-8 Airborne Laboratory will deploy from Palmdale in California to Melbourne in Australia. On the day of the entry, it will fly in a race-track pattern at some distance from the landing site so that the entry is visible at low elevation angles out of the left-hand window ports. Windows are optical glass of various kind to provide the best possible view. The DC-8 aircraft is operated out of the NASA Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California, where scientists will meet in the weeks prior to the mission to install their instruments.

The conditions of entry.
The 40-cm diameter capsule will be detached from the main spacecraft when passing the Moon's orbit, put in a 5 rotations/second spin. Depending on the time of release, it will have moved about 2-5 km ahead of the main spacecraft when reaching atmospheric interface at 200 km altitude.
Because Hayabusa is on an asteroidal orbit around the Sun, the time of arrival will not be affected much by last-minute manouvers. The entry will occur in the middle of the night in dark-sky conditions. In close collaboration with JAXA, the latest positional information on the capsule will be communicated to the science team, better preparing the team for the arrival of the capsule.

[The Master Cool]

Japanese built. 4 billion km on the odometer.

Gotta be a Hilux engine eh.

[PlanK]

This could be Australia's trump card in the whaling debate.

Jap negotiator: "We like whaling. We're keeping it."
Aus negotiator: "We like satelittes. We're keeping it."

[Roger Ramjet]

The trajectory plot has now been released

http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/enterp/missio ... .shtml#new

So if you are in Pt Headland, Broome to Woomera or can see the skies over it at 11.22 pm Sun 13 th night watch the show, re entry vehicle will be followed by spacecraft, I suspect the first will be (to quote) Cool and the second will be really realy cool. It is 1*1.2*2 mtrs in size and weighs a few hundred kilos, it will be the fastest spacecraft reentry ever!

SA Sightings are from Glendambo and Coober Pedy where the road blocks closing the highway will be.

Keep in touch with the blog from JAXA here

HAYABUSA -The Final Approach-

We will be watching above!! Our little Thai/Aussie spectator's team are heading for the "dugout" in Coober Pedy to try to take some Pics...It will probably be frosty, about Zero degrees at 11.22 pm Sunday night....but with the clearest sky and spectacular star show in the world!

[Roger Ramjet]

From Looking at the trajectory of this Spacecraft, I think it may even be visible as it "glows white Hot on re-entry" as a "shooting Star" low on the southern horizon from Thailand, but I may be wrong! So if you happen to be sitting on verandah drinking piss and facing South at about 8.30pm on Sunday night, and see a "shooting star" you may be witnessing an historic event....then again it will probably be cloudy as hell, and pissing with rain!

[khang]

This could be Australia's trump card in the whaling debate.

Jap negotiator: "We like whaling. We're keeping it."
Aus negotiator: "We like satelittes. We're keeping it."

Ouch !!

Advice to the loser: Best way to recover from asteroids is to use Preparation A-tsh.

Good luck.

[Roger Ramjet]

Well we drove the 2,000km to and fro, and sat watching the stars for hours from Coober Pedy, but we missed it!.......But had a great weekend underground digging some opal! The Satelite did detach from the space vehicle (as planned 7 years ago), and made a gentle arrival on the Woomera Rocket Range under parachute as hoped....... just before midnight Sunday. On Monday afternoon it was collected by helicopter, and it is now on it's way to Japan, for opening and scientific study. The link below shows it's arrival (which we missed!)

Video: Hayabusa Spacecraft's Fiery Return From Asteroid

[Roger Ramjet]

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[Roger Ramjet]

[Roger Ramjet]

Here is the little sucker!!! and now they will take it to Japan, open it and study the specs of dust for years!

[aging one]

damn that is just incredible, and it was spectacular as it came in on TV.

How many kazillion miles did that little thing fly?

[Roger Ramjet]

June 24, 2010 Updated
Starting to open HAYABUSA sample container

A capsule of the Asteroid Explorer "HAYABUSA," which returned to Earth on June 13, was brought to the curation facility at the Sagamihara Campus to be inspected and disassembled.
From the 24th, we finally started to open the sample container in the capsule. It will take one week to complete the opening of the container.

[Cujo]

June 24, 2010 Updated
Starting to open HAYABUSA sample container

A capsule of the Asteroid Explorer "HAYABUSA," which returned to Earth on June 13, was brought to the curation facility at the Sagamihara Campus to be inspected and disassembled.
From the 24th, we finally started to open the sample container in the capsule. It will take one week to complete the opening of the container.

Well that's just great. Now the space monkey virus is going to escape and eat all our brains.
just fucking great.

[Roger Ramjet]

That's why the Aussies didn't open it ....just sent it to Japan, and then the Japanese are supposed to send it on to Britian....

[Roger Ramjet]

Japanese scientists have begun to open the Hayabusa asteroid capsule.
The canister, which returned to Earth on 13 June, is being worked on at the Japanese space agency's (Jaxa) Sagamihara Campus in Kanagawa.
It is hoped the vessel will contain small amounts of dust grabbed from the surface of asteroid Itokawa by a spacecraft in 2005.
Researchers said they had already detected a trace gas in the capsule but had yet to identify it.

"Obviously one of the poor little frightened bastards farted!"

[Roger Ramjet]

As42nd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference March 7-11 in Houston. an update to the Hayabusa Japanese Space science mission.........small dust particles were found in the Hayabusa space craft, and a number of very scientific findings were presented at 42nd annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference March 7-11 in Houston.

Scientific research is continuing on these minute particles recovered from deep space last yeear and returned to Earth at the Woomera rocket range in central South Australia.
by Ian Lyon


Click to enlarge >
The Hayabusa science team
Credit: Courtesy of LPI
Hayabusa was a Japanese mission to return material from an asteroid, Itokawa. Its long story was a series of major problems, mainly overcome, but until the sample collector was opened, it wasn't known whether Hayabusa returned any sample at all. Its sample collection mechanism had failed to fire and all the team could hope for was that some grains dislodged from the touch and go by Hayabusa on the asteroid surface had drifted up into the sample collection chambers.

Here at LPSC, a whole morning session was devoted to the Japanese science team who were to report on their preliminary findings. It's a logistical detail that abstracts for talks have to be submitted in January and the Japanese preliminary science team only started work on the samples then. So the abstracts all said "we will report results…." somewhat hopefully perhaps but in the event, almost all teams managed to report results and had conducted remarkably extensive studies considering the very short timescale.
Click to enlarge >
Hayabusa session at the 42nd LPSC
The lecture room was full as conference delegates listened intently to the Japanese scientists' preliminary reports. Credit: Courtesy of LPI
Somewhat unusually for scientific talks, the Japanese team also managed to deliver their work with wit and humour and raised a number of laughs. When the sample chambers were opened they looked clean and empty. There was nothing visible larger than one millimeter in size, but fortunately on closer inspection, some smaller grains were observed. The team tried to pick out the grains with a quartz glass probe but this wasn't too successful at picking up the small particles. They then tried scraping a Teflon spatula across some of the chamber surface and fortunately on subsequent inspection in an SEM, found a number of grains stuck to the edge of the spatula. These grains had to be picked from the Teflon spatula and distinguished and separated from a large number of similarly sized aluminium-rich particles that were also present, a result of the scraping of the aluminium sample chamber surface.

Finally, somewhat in desperation one suspects, they turned the chamber upside down and held it over a quartz disk and hit the back of the chamber 20 times with the handle of a large screwdriver! This raised quite a laugh, possibly in disbelief at the procedure!


Click to enlarge >
Photo inside the Hayabusa sample capsule
A photo taken on June 28, 2010 through the window of its protective vacuum chamber shows the clean-looking interior of Hayabusa's small sample return capsule. Credit: JAXA / JSPEC
So, about 1,500 particles have been separated so far for analysis and the second chamber still remains with presumably a similar number of particles inside. The particles were all tiny though. The largest is only 180 microns, and most of the 1,500 were 10 microns or less. Another funny slide showed a huge circular table with lots of seats around with a tiny slice of cake in the middle.

A set of four large grains were studied, the largest one 100 by 30 microns, which was given the name Aiko. Three other slightly smaller ones were called Takaoki, Michael, and Toshi, after four people who had done a great deal of work on the grains. Aiko was covered by fine particulate grains "like cosmetics on a woman" -- to more laughter.

Very careful oxygen isotope abundance measurements and the overall petrology and elemental abundances of minerals show pretty conclusively that Itokawa is an LL5 chondritic body. The "chondritic" part means that the elemental ratios are broadly similar to the starting material that went to make up the solar system at its formation. It hasn't been heavily processed, unlike material in the Earth or Mars. The "LL" part means that it is low in iron, and low in metals generally. "5" means that it has been quite strongly thermally metamorphosed. That means that most of the minerals have been equilibriated, heated to such a high temperature that they have become homogenised between their neighbouring grains. There are some variations, with some grains identified as "H" (high in iron) and some as "LL4" (a little less altered) but it's clear that most of the body has been extensively heated and metamorphosed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, no organic materials have yet been detected.

The grains that were analysed for noble gas contents showed that they were full of light noble gases that matched the solar wind, so these grains have been at the surface of Itokawa for a long time and become saturated with solar wind atoms.

Possibly the most significant thing that the Itokawa grains can tell us is about a process called "space weathering." There are tens of thousands of meteorites in collections around the world, and we would like to know where they come from. One way to try and find out the parent asteroids is to compare their optical spectra with different meteorites. But when meteorites come to Earth they are ablated in a fireball as they descend through the atmosphere, so we can't see the original surfaces that were exposed to space. Grains on the surfaces of asteroids still in space are altered by solar wind bombardment and micrometeorite impacts. This affects their spectra, and makes it problematic to compare them to meteorites found on Earth. The Itokawa grains have been exposed on the surface of the asteroid, as shown by the solar wind noble gas contents of the grains, so they can studied to see how they have been altered by these processes. Many of the grains showed thin (tens of nanometers) rims of altered materials probably caused by the space weathering process, and the preliminary conclusion is that the dominant space weathering process is solar wind sputtering.
And now for those mineralogical and petrological facts about the particles.

[at]asrivkin: Lessons learned from handling the Stardust samples helped with Hayabusa sample analysis.

[at]The_Stargazer: Of the 1,500 particles returned, 52 were distributed for preliminary analysis. Total Hayabusa sample amounts to less than 1 milligram. Classification of large Hayabusa particles included olivine, followed by pyroxene, plagioclase, troilite. Also taenite and chromite.

[at]asrivkin: Of the 52, 5 were analyzed for space weathering, 3 for noble gases, 40 for mainstream analysis. Mineralogy consistent with an LL chondrite! Just like Binzel et al (2001) said. 31 of 38 particles are highly equilibrated, the rest poorly equilibrated. First group like LL5-6, second like LL4. Of the 40 particles in mainstream analysis, 55% were polymineralic, 45% monomineralic, mostly olivine. Most particles have sharp edges, but about 25% have rounded edges. Those particles seem to be more space weathered. Mean microporosity ~1.4%,compared to 5+/-2% seen in lab for LL chondrites. A Grain density of about 3.4 g/cm3 implies 40% macroporosity on Itokawa. In terms of their ellipsoidal shape, they have axial ratios of about 1 : 0.7 : 0.4 for sample particles. Disk-like particles are abundant. Not terribly unlike lab experiments? Different space weathering styles in different minerals? Micrometeorites ineffective on Itokawa? Solar wind sputtering major agent?

[at]MonicaGrady: Large Hayabusa particles are rocks. Olivine, Fa 24 to 31 [this describes the proportion of magnesium to iron in the olivine mineral]. Classification LL4. But it's not as simple as that. There are two populations of olivine, all in one 100 micron rock. Same with pyroxene. It is an LL 4 breccia with LL5-6 clasts. Mean porosity lower than LL chondrites because the particles aren't cracked.

[at]barbylon: My spacecraft went all the way to Itokawa and all I got was an equilibrated LL chondrite.

[ItsRobsLife]

So it was somewhat of a failure in collecting samples, but an incredible achievement nonetheless. Lets hope Hayabusa II is more successful.

[DrAndy]

So, about 1,500 particles have been separated so far for analysis and the second chamber still remains with presumably a similar number of particles inside. The particles were all tiny though. The largest is only 180 microns, and most of the 1,500 were 10 microns or less.

Very careful oxygen isotope abundance measurements and the overall petrology and elemental abundances of minerals show pretty conclusively that Itokawa is an LL5 chondritic body. The "chondritic" part means that the elemental ratios are broadly similar to the starting material that went to make up the solar system at its formation. It hasn't been heavily processed, unlike material in the Earth or Mars. The "LL" part means that it is low in iron, and low in metals generally. "5" means that it has been quite strongly thermally metamorphosed. That means that most of the minerals have been equilibriated, heated to such a high temperature that they have become homogenised between their neighbouring grains. There are some variations, with some grains identified as "H" (high in iron) and some as "LL4" (a little less altered) but it's clear that most of the body has been extensively heated and metamorphosed.

The Itokawa grains have been exposed on the surface of the asteroid, as shown by the solar wind noble gas contents of the grains, so they can studied to see how they have been altered by these processes. Many of the grains showed thin (tens of nanometers) rims of altered materials probably caused by the space weathering process, and the preliminary conclusion is that the dominant space weathering process is solar wind sputtering.

so it was a success at collecting samples, albeit they were quite small; the body being a chondrite may have been disappointing but also probably expected