[X] My Assistant

[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

[centsworth_II]

Here's the English version:
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T101223003538.htm

"The government will give the science ministry the full amount--3 billion yen--it requested for development of the Hayabusa 2 space probe in the fiscal 2011 budget, sources said...."

[pandaneko]

I have got this feeling that we may shift this topic into Hayabusa 2 which already exsists. The reason is that Hayabusa 1's news will continue to come in, I think, in the next year and it might become confusing to talk about the two within the same stream...

Perhaps, I should have done just that myself in the first place, if I come to think about it...

Pandaneko

[pandaneko]

Another crazy thought... I was not sure where I should put this in and in the end chose this place. I am still talking about the need for engineering cameras.

Although, not directory relevant to interplanetatry missions, I tell you one episode about Hayabusa's capsule helicopter recovery. Heat shield and its inrared signnature and all that.

They did a rehearsal before hand, and what they used was a traditional Japanese feet warmer used in your bed filled with warm water. These things used to be made of corrugated metals, but increasingly these are now made of plastics, to hold warm water inside them.

I do not use one, as I use my electric bluncket, but there are still people, eldery people, who prefer these traditional warmers. Having said that, let me come to the main issue, engineering cameras.

With Hayabusa Minerva was lost (and only one image returned to earth, I think), and it must have been a very expensive system. However, prior to that deployment they sent a target marker down to the surface of the asteroid. That thing was remarkably primitive, with multi-rfelection surfaces, but what it boiled down to was another traditional thing, called ohajiki, for mainly small girls to play with.

Ohajiki is made of small beans and enclosed in a cloth (here on earth, that is) container to make it roughly round, about 5 cm in diam. With Hayabusa, two of them was used, as I remember, and the idea was that on landing they do not rebounce.

Now, if we have an engineering camara, with a fish eye lens attached to it, can we not forget about MINERVA kind of sophisticated and expensive monitoring devices? Whether angle setting is right or not should not matter as long as a fish eye lens is attached with the marker. It does not be firmly fixed, for cost saving, I think.

If we can arrange for that kind of markers, then we should be able to see what is coming down from above, and even what went wrong on landing, etc, etc. Of course, we should have another camera on board the probe itself.

Pandaneko