Hayabusa Post-Landing & Science Results Options

[Paolo]

arXiv today has two papers on Hayabusa re-entry:
Photographic Observations of the Hayabusa Re-entry and Near-Ultraviolet and Visible Spectroscopy of HAYABUSA Spacecraft Re-entry

[Lightning]

I have downloaded the new Hayabusa images with geometry backplanes (here: the ddr_gaskell.tar at http://sbn.psi.edu/pds/resource/amicageom.html), and NASAview was unable to read the NxNx 16bands images. After some efforts, I succeeded to read them, it was such a pain.
I had to redevelop my own script to read those strange 32 bits. I had never seen that before: the bytes are swaped, but the bits in each byte must be read normally.

Well, finally those data are wonderful.

[Blue Sky]

Scanning Electron Microscope analysis of samples brought back by Hayabusa reveal a lot of "space weathering".

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/0...oid-itokawa.ars

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/17/1116236109

[Floyd]

What an impressive paper! To have such important results come out of a mission with such hardship is fantastic. My congratulations to the Hayabusa team--the engineers who brought the craft home and the scientist who never lost hope that they would have something to study.