Mission: Hayabusa 2 Options

[spdf]

JAXA wants to continue with Hayabusa 2. However there is/was a huge fight about the budget. Main problem was the budget for the launch vehicle. 2 months ago or so there was a report which said, that JAXA had to find another launch vehicle or the project gets cancelled. Now the Italian space agency played saviour and overed the VEGA. So finally we might see another Hayabusa in 2011.


It was mentioned here:
http://www.jspec.jaxa.jp/080110Final_IPEWG-ProgramBook.pdf

[Littlebit]

As I recall, the problem with the Haybusa sampling horn is that the probe landed much sooner than anticipated. I would guess - this is only a guess- that the software engineers did not expect the timing of the landing to be off this much and did not have the necessary flags set for the sampling sequence to execute. It is unclear (to me) whether or not the probe left because of a timer, a maximum temperature was exceeded, or the probe was ordered to depart from earth.

In any case, since they have not changed the design of the sampling horn; it seems a likely conclusion that the failure to collect a pair of good samples was the result of a sequencing error rather than a failure of the sampling horn.