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?

[Phil Stooke]

Here is a corrected version of the Itokawa names image.

I'm grateful to nop for correcting me on this. There is a bit more to the story as well. Another person who saw the image queried the name I had spelled incorrectly, pointing out the humorous and/or unfortunate interpretation of it. So naturally, instead of checking with the LPSC abstracts, the sources for my names, I simply googled the name as I had originally spelled it. And wouldn't you know, there were lots of pages with the name spelled in that wrong way, referring to a mountain or mountain range in Japan. So I assumed the wrong spelling was in fact correct. Well, let that be a lesson to me never to rely only on Google, which is just as effective at finding mistakes as facts.

Anyway, I do hope we will soon see some official Japanese maps of this lovely little world.

Phil

[nop]

Thank you for your quick revision, Phil.

I also tried googling "Shirikami". Most of the pages are intended to refer "Shirakami mountain" as one of UNESCO world heritage, but I found that there really exists a place named "Shirikami"! it was a new discovery to me

FYI, here are origins of the names (it's just my speculation and not the official announce of JAXA/ISAS):

Muses Sea: MUSES-C and greek goddess
Little Woomera: the place in Australia for capsule recovery
Uchinoura: Uchinoura Space Center. Hayabusa was launched from here
Sagamihara: the name of the city where ISAS is located
Yoshinodai: the name of the town where ISAS is located
Fuchinobe: the name of the nearest station to ISAS
Tsukuba: where the JAXA Space Center (old NASDA) is located
Usuda: JAXA Deep Space Center with 64m antenna
Yatsugatake: A mountain near Usuda
Shirakami: I'm not sure but it might be a mountain range near JAXA/ISAS Testing Center
Kamisunagawa: there was a facility for zero-gravity experiment (now there isn't)
Komaba: ISAS was here a decade ago
pencil boulder: the first Japanese rocket was called "pencil rocket", created by Dr. Hideo Itokawa

[ljk4-1]

The Hayabusa mission and its planetoid target are the cover
subjects of the latest The Planetary Society The Planetary Report:

Hayabusa: A Daring Sample Return Mission

Japan's ambitious mission to land on an asteroid, collect samples, and return them to Earth has had its ups and downs. The tiny but robust spacecraft, with its determined ground crew, worked through problem after problem on its way to sample asteroid Itokawa. In the end, the "little spacecraft that could" revealed for the first time the rocky surface of Itokawa, dropped a memento from Earth onto its surface, and may have collected a sample of surface dust to return to Earth. Although we don't yet know if engineers will be able to guide the spacecraft back to Earth for the sample return, the Hayabusa mission team has much to be proud of. Journalist A.J.S. Rayl has been reporting on the spacecraft since before its launch in 2003. Here, she tells the story of Hayabusa's harrowing adventure.

http://www.planetary.org/programs/planetary_report.html