Japanese
probe pulls alongside
asteroid
Hayabusa To Collect Rock
Samples Bringing Japan most complex
space mission near its climax a probe is within just 20 km from an asteroid almost 300 million-km away from Earth in an unprecedented touch-and-go rendezvous designed to retrieve rocks from its surface.
The Hayabusa probe,launched in May 2003,will hover around the asteroid for about three months before making its unprecedented –and very brief –landing to recover the samples in early November.The asteroid is about 290 million kilometers away between Earth and Mars
“The mission is going very smoothly and proceeding as planned”, Atsushi Wako a spokeman for JAXA , Japan space agency said on Tuesday.
The asteroid ,informally named Itokawa , after Hideo Itokawa , the father of rocket science in Japan, is only 2300 feet long and 1000 feet wide ,and has a gravitational pull only one-one-hundred-thousandth of Earths .Though it took two years to get there the asteroid is among the closet neighbours to Earth other than moon.,
The probe first mission will be to survey the asteroid with cameras and infrared imaging gear .It has already begun sending back images ,Wako said .When Hayabusa moves in for the rendezous , expected to be over in a matter of seconds ,it will pull up close enough to fire a small bullet into the asteroid and collect the ejected fragments in a funnel-like device .Its wont be coming back with much—the amount of material planners hope to capture wouldn’t even fill a teaspoon.
JAXA officials say Hayabasu would be the worlds first two way trip to an asteroid .A Nasa probe collected data for two weeks from the surface of the Manhattan –sized asteroid Eros in 2001, but it did not return with physical samples. No samples have been brought back to Earth from the space mission since the US Apollo moon project in the 1970s .Despite a glitch with one of Hayabasus 3 gyroscopes the mission has been largely mishap free .Wako said the probe is set to return to Earth and land in Australia in June 2007.
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