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The Japanese space agency is nearing the end of a journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the early eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues to the origins of life on Earth.
But first he’ll have to go on a treasure hunt in the Australian outback.
This weekend, fragments of an asteroid will land in an arid region near Woomera in South Australia. These were ferried to Earth by Hayabusa2, a robotic space probe launched by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, in 2014 to explore an asteroid called Ryugu, a dark, carbon-rich rock just over half a mile wide.
The success of the mission and the science it produces will increase Japan’s status as a central player in deep space exploration, along with NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia. JAXA currently has a spacecraft orbiting Venus studying that planet’s infernal climate and is collaborating with Europeans on a mission en route to Mercury.
In the next few years, Japan plans to bring back the rocks from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and to contribute to NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts to Earth’s moon.
But the immediate challenge will be the search in the dark for a 16-inch-wide capsule containing the asteroid samples somewhere between hundreds of square miles in a region 280 miles north of Adelaide, the nearest large city.
“It’s really in the middle of nowhere,” said Shogo Tachibana, principal investigator in charge of analyzing the Hayabusa2 samples. He is part of a team of over 70 people from Japan who arrived in Woomera for the recovery of the capsule. The area, used by the Australian military for testing, offers a large open space ideal for the return of an interplanetary probe.
The small return capsule separated from the main spacecraft about 12 hours before its intended landing, when it was about 125,000 miles from Earth. JAXA will broadcast live coverage of the capsule’s landing starting at 11:30 am Eastern time on Saturday. (Sunday in Australia will be before dawn.)
The capsule should touch the ground a few minutes before noon.
In an interview, Makoto Yoshikawa, the head of the mission, said there is an uncertainty of about 10 kilometers, or about six miles, in identifying where the capsule will re-enter the atmosphere. At an altitude of six miles, the capsule will release a parachute, and where it will drift as it descends will add to the uncertainty.
“The landing site depends on the wind that day,” said Dr. Yoshikawa. The area the researchers may need to cover could span about 60 miles, he said.
The trail of the superheated air fireball created by the re-entering capsule will help guide the recovery team, as does the capsule’s beacon. The task will become much more difficult if the lighthouse fails or if the parachute fails to deploy.
There is also a bit of a rush. The team hopes to recover the capsule, perform the initial analysis, and return it to Japan within 100 hours. Even if the capsule is sealed, the concern is that the earth’s air will slowly drain inside. “There is no perfect seal,” said Dr. Tachibana.
Once the capsule is found, a helicopter will take it to a laboratory that has been set up at the Australian Air Force Base in Woomera. There an instrument will extract any gases inside the capsule that may have been released from the asteroid’s rocks as they were shaken and broken during reentry. Dr Yoshikawa said the scientists would also like to see if they can detect any helium particles from the solar wind that have crashed into the asteroid and remained embedded in the rocks.
The gases would also reassure scientists that Hayabusa2 actually successfully collected samples from Ryugu. A minimum of 0.1 grams, or less than 1/280 of an ounce, is needed to declare success. The hope is that the spacecraft brought back several grams.
In Japan, the Hayabusa2 team will begin analyzing the Ryugu samples. In about a year, some of the samples will be shared with other scientists for further study.
To collect these samples, Hayabusa2 arrived on the asteroid in June 2018. It performed a series of investigations, each of increasing technical complexity. He dropped the probes on Ryugu’s surface, blew a hole in the asteroid to scan what lies beneath, and twice went down to the surface to grab small chunks of the asteroid – an operation that proved far more challenging. than expected due to the numerous boulders present. the surface.
Small worlds like Ryugu were of little interest to planetary scientists who focused on studying planets, said Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director general of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences, part of the JAXA. “Minor bodies, who cares?” He said. “But if you take the formation of planetary systems seriously, small bodies really matter.”
Studying the water trapped in Ryugu’s minerals could give clues as to whether the water in Earth’s oceans came from asteroids and whether the carbon-based molecules could have sown the bricks for life.
Part of the Ryugu samples will go to NASA, which is reporting some rocks and soil from another asteroid with its OSIRIS-REX mission. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft has studied a smaller carbon-rich asteroid called Bennu and will return to Earth next spring, leaving its rock samples in September 2023.
Ryugu and Bennu turned out to be surprisingly similar in some ways, both looking like spinning tops and with surfaces covered with boulders, but different in other respects. The rocks on Ryugu appear to hold much less water, for example. The meaning of the similarities and differences will not become clear until scientists have studied the rocks in more detail.
“When the OSIRIS-REX sample returns, we will have lessons learned from the Hayabusa2 mission,” said Harold C. Connolly Jr., professor of geology at Rowan University in New Jersey and the mission scientist for OSIRIS-REX. “The similarities and differences are absolutely fascinating.”
Dr Connolly hopes to go to Japan next summer to take part in the analysis of the Ryugu samples.
Hayabusa2 is not Japan’s first planetary mission. In fact, its name indicates the existence of Hayabusa, a previous mission that brought back samples from another asteroid, Itokawa. But that mission, which started in 2003 and returned in 2010, had to face major technical problems. So did the JAXA Akatsuki spacecraft, currently in orbit around Venus, which the Japanese agency was able to bring back on a scientific mission after years of difficulty. A Japanese mission to Mars also failed in 2003.
By contrast, Hayabusa2’s operations went almost smoothly, even though it retains the same overall design as its predecessor. “In reality, there are no major problems,” said Dr. Yoshikawa, the head of the mission. “Sure, the little ones.”
He said the team has studied the failures on Hayabusa in detail and made the necessary changes, and has also conducted numerous tests to try to anticipate any contingencies it might encounter.
Japanese missions generally operate on lower budgets than NASA and therefore often carry fewer tools. The cost of Hayabusa2 is less than $ 300 million while the price of OSIRIS-REX will be around $ 1 billion.
Releasing the Ryugu Champions is not the end of the Hayabusa2 mission. After releasing the return capsule, the main spacecraft changed course to avoid a collision with Earth, missing 125 miles. It will now travel to another asteroid, a tiny 1998 designated KY26 that is only 100 feet in diameter but spins rapidly, completing a rotation in less than 11 minutes.
Hayabusa2 will use two Earth flybys to launch towards KY26, finally arriving in 2031. It will conduct some astronomical experiments during its long journey into deep space, and the spacecraft still carries one last projectile it can use to test the surface of that space rock.
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