A capsule carrying alien specimens collected by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 is slated to land in South Australia on December 6 to complete a six-year round-trip mission to an asteroid, officials announced this week.
Officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and the Australian Space Agency said Tuesday that they are preparing for the return of Hayabusa 2 in December.
The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft will launch a sample return container as it approaches Earth, then drift off the planet and continue into space. Protected by a heat shield, the nearly 16-inch-diameter (40-centimeter) return capsule will dive into the atmosphere at more than 26,000 mph (43,000 km / h) and deploy a parachute for a soft landing in Australia.
Like Japan’s first Hayabusa mission, which returned specimens of microscopic asteroids in 2010, the Hayabusa 2 landing capsule will aim to land in the Woomera Forbidden Area in South Australia.
“Hayabusa’s successful return in 2010 is a great example of achieving a shared ambition with her international counterparts through the association,” Megan Clark, head of the Australian Space Agency, said in a statement. “This activity again highlights the role Australia can play in the growing space economy. We look forward to working with JAXA and encouraging entrepreneurship while ensuring that our activities are safe, in space and on Earth. ”
JAXA and the Australian government will cooperate to prepare for the return of Hayabusa 2. The Australian Space Agency said it will coordinate the licensing requirements for the landing of the sample aircraft carrier Hayabusa 2, which will include a Return Authorization for the spacecraft launched abroad from the Australian Government.
The Australian military, which oversees operations at the Woomera Range Complex in South Australia, will provide support and access to the Hayabusa 2 landing zone, authorities said.
The Hayabusa 2 mission’s return to Earth was planned for late 2020 since the spacecraft launched from Japan in December 2014 aboard an H-2A rocket. The spacecraft arrived at Ryugu, a half-mile-wide (900-meter) asteroid that crosses Earth’s orbit, in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey.
The spacecraft launched a fleet of landers and rovers to explore the asteroid’s surface, then approached Ryugu for two tactile landings in 2019 to collect rock fragments from two different locations. During one of the sample collection maneuvers, Hayabusa 2 descended into an artificial crater created by an explosive impactor released by the spacecraft, allowing the probe to collect material from the asteroid’s subsoil.
Scientists are eager to analyze the samples, which they hope may contain organic molecules. The researchers believe that asteroids like Ryugu, or a larger body like the one Ryugu separated from, could have seeded Earth with the materials necessary for life.
Hayabusa 2 left Ryugu in November 2019 to begin the yearlong journey back to Earth. The probe uses ionic thrusters to reshape its path through the solar system, with the goal of reaching Earth in December.
Authorities confirmed the investigation’s return date of December 6, Australian time, on Tuesday. The landing of the sample capsule will complete a round-trip mission spanning more than 3.2 billion miles (5.2 billion km).
“The successful completion of this vintage sample return mission is a great partnership between Australia and Japan and will be a symbol of international cooperation and of overcoming the difficulties and crises caused by the pandemic,” JAXA and the Australian Space Agency said in a joint statement. Tuesday.
As of this week, Hayabusa 2 was located about 57 million miles (92 million km) from Earth, and the probe’s ion engines had generated more than half the boost needed to steer the spacecraft into its ride back.
As the Hayabusa 2 mission operations team in Japan continues to guide the spacecraft on its journey home, scientists are also preparing for the task of retrieving the asteroid specimens from the return boat and taking them from Australia to Japan for your analysis.
Mission planners designed Hayabusa 2 to collect at least 100 milligrams of material from the asteroid Ryugu. Engineers have no way of measuring the contents of the sample container until it returns to Earth, but they are confident that the spacecraft collected the required material due to the near-perfect performance of the sampling system during touch-and-go landing operations. last year .
The Hayabusa 2 mission has contrasted with the Hayabusa mission in Japan, which encountered numerous problems during a seven-year mission to the asteroid Itokawa in the 2000s. Hayabusa returned to Earth, but a malfunction of its sample collection system meant that he returned with a small fraction of the expected specimens.
A recovery team in Australia will locate the Hayabusa 2 sample container with the help of a radio beacon, then secure it for a flight to Japan, where scientists will transfer the capsule to an ultra-clean healing facility. The researchers will open the canister and extract the asteroid samples for analysis with sophisticated laboratory instruments.
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