[X] My Assistant

[Phil Stooke]

ISAS Hayabusa update...

http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/snews/2005/0826.shtml

Phil

[alan]

Looks like you can see its shadow in those images. Gives me the impression that it has a thin atmosphere like a weakly active comet. Probably just an imaging artifact though.

[Bob Shaw]

Looks like you can see its shadow in those images. Gives me the impression that it has a thin atmosphere like a weakly active comet. Probably just an imaging artifact though.

Alan:

The 'shadow' runs in the same direction as the herringbone noise pattern across the whole of the image, so I'd say it's in the camera!

Bob Shaw

[RNeuhaus]

New updates
The orbit maneuver of HAYABUSA spacecraft was handed over from the ion engines to the bi-propellant thrusters on August 28 JST.
After the solar conjunction the microwave discharge ion engines were turned on again at the end of July and accelerated with their full throttling so as to approach to the target.
At the end of August HAYABUSA stays 4,800km (3,000 miles) apart from Asteroid ITOKAWA and is still closing it at 32km/h (20 milles/h) velocity with the ion engines off.

Calculating the time required to reach Itokawa = 4,800 km/32 km/h = 150 hours (6 days and 6 hours) and the space will be stopped at 20 km before of Itokawa. At this distance, the potato's shape image will be pretty tasty

Rodolfo

[djellison]

Less than a week until it gets to the asteroid then - at which point I assume they'll match speed using bi-prop thrusters.

Doug

[Toma B]

Distance from Itokawa 3220 km... and closing in...
I just can't wait...

[antoniseb]

I just can't wait...

I can't either, but so far I haven't seen a lot of details on the English language site for this probe. I hope that they manage to make the images and data from this probe available using the Mars MER model as opposed to the ESA Huygens model, or worse yet the NASA WMAP model.

[deglr6328]

What was wrong with the Wilkinson probe? They needed to take data for the whole 2 year (?) mission before it could be assembled cleaned and presented visually....

[djellison]

Yeah WMAP was one of those missions that isnt a 'pretty' mission -it's just data coming down, takes a while to assemble it into anything visual.

Doug

[Guest_Myran_*]

I can't either, but so far I haven't seen a lot of details on the English language site for this probe. I hope that they manage to make the images and data from this probe available using the Mars MER model as opposed to the ESA Huygens model, or worse yet the NASA WMAP model.

Lets see whats wrong with Huygens, we had 3 decent images within an hour of the signal reaching Earth, and all images from the decent plus some data from the decent publicly available in two days.
Now tell me whats wrong with that?

[antoniseb]

Lets see whats wrong with Huygens ...
Now tell me whats wrong with that?

Hi Myran, I'm not looking for a fight here, but I was pretty disappointed that Huygens did not post all raw images, and more importantly didn't (as far as I could find) publish the data from the mass spectrometer or other instruments. So, compared to the relative openness of the MER data, the Huygens data looks fairly protected from public scrutiny... As I noted above, the WMAP data is much more secret. Huygens is not the worst case.

[tedstryk]

Hi Myran, I'm not looking for a fight here, but I was pretty disappointed that Huygens did not post all raw images, and more importantly didn't (as far as I could find) publish the data from the mass spectrometer or other instruments. So, compared to the relative openness of the MER data, the Huygens data looks fairly protected from public scrutiny... As I noted above, the WMAP data is much more secret. Huygens is not the worst case.

Actually, you are wrong on that one....the Huygens raws are released and have been since not long after the descent. And refer to others' comments on WMAP.

[TheChemist]

To be fair to Huygens...

Only the images from the MERs are released immediately to the public, not the various spectrometry data. We only see a fraction of Mossbauer, XPS and TES data once in a while, and that's how it should be, these need careful analysis and proper presentation in peer reviewed publications.

Huygens had only one chance for photography and spectrometry readings, and we got to see all images plus GC-MS data very quickly.

[Guest_Myran_*]

I wasnt trying to pick a fight either, only asking what was wrong with a press release and 3 images just hours after the infomation had been brought to Earth.
Images plus webcasts of the press releases were available for dowload from a website hosted in Darmstadt within hours, also from the British interplanetary society. Livecasts were sent over the web from Darmstadt, I followed that myself.
Information were quickly handed over to various scientific publications who had presentation on their online enditions within days of the early scientific results from Huygens.
ESA main headquarters was beaten by a private webpage at Arizona university in the USA at: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~kholso/data.htm for releasing the full set of images.
Like on this website were amateurs space buffs (and image pros) makes pans of Mars, amateurs put together a panorama of the decent images from Heygens that were spread several days ahead of one such panorama appeared on ESA' main web.
Those are the facts. You cant ask for any more transparency in a spacemission than this.

[Bob Shaw]

I think we've all been soured by SMART-1 and Mars Express, where the merest t-r-i-c-k-l-e of uber-blandness has marked ESA's PR aimed at the general public - never mind it's responsibilities towards us guys!

It makes ESA's good-ish efforts vanish in a tide of disgruntled complaints about when things *are* terrible!