Hayabusa - The Return To Earth, The voyage home Options

[odave]

...starting a new thread for Hayabusa's sampling feedback and the return voyage.

After its nail-biting success in November, will there be enough fuel for the Falcon to make it home?

[edstrick]

Holder of the Two Leashes:
"The reason it didn't show much surface variation is because, as this instrument discovered, there was no significate variation to report. "

I remain unconvinced of that. The areas of greatest color and albedo variation, or features where composition variations might be expected, were generally well below 1/2 km in size. I'm specifically referring to the high albedo steep slopes inside the freshest craters and the small, slightly darker than general regolith smooth "ponds" in crater bottoms.

I note that the camera, which had a TINY CCD detector with non-square pixels and high noise levels (obvious in low-contrast stretched images of a high contrast target) had real trouble seeing color variations, but they were there once enough pixels on a target were averaged.

Global color variations are near zero, but weak local ones, mostly on 100 or 50 meter scales and smaller are present. I expect/suspect similar ones were present in infrared wavelengths but were undetected due to resolution and possible signal/noise factors.

[Holder of the Tw...]

I note that the camera, which had a TINY CCD detector with non-square pixels and high noise levels (obvious in low-contrast stretched images of a high contrast target) had real trouble seeing color variations, but they were there once enough pixels on a target were averaged.

Global color variations are near zero, but weak local ones, mostly on 100 or 50 meter scales and smaller are present.  I expect/suspect similar ones were present in infrared wavelengths but were undetected due to resolution and possible signal/noise factors.

I misunderstood you completely. I thought you were saying that the NIS could not resolve any part of Eros. One theory about part of the variation you're talking about is that the color differences are due to the fresh material being "unweathered".

One other thing I don't understand, though, is what your whole point is. Are you saying NEAR should have been put off for five years in order to get more advanced infrared detector technology? Or perhaps you are saying the United States should have scuttled the NEAR and Deep Space 1 programs, waited for some other nation (perhaps Japan) to fly both a dedicated asteroid mission and ion engine driven spacecraft first, and then build our own programs on their experience more cheaply?