It stunned, flashed, then disappeared into the flash. Early Sunday morning, sample capsule from Japan Haibusa 2 spacecraft The mining town sank by the atmosphere above Kuber Paddy In Australia, Australia, a momentary glow of fire in the sky
Above the Lookout Cave Motel in the city center, at 4 a.m. local time (9:30 a.m. PT on Saturday), about a dozen people gathered and mingled. The tripod was erected and the camera equipment was fine-tuned and pointed to the sky. Then, without sound, a flickering point of light appeared from the darkness. He moved quickly. Crowds erupted with “Oohs”, and some pointed their phones at the sky.
Ross, 34, of Townville, Queensland, and his two sons, Max, 6, and Chase, 8, were featured on the show. “It was great,” Ross said. “It was worth getting up early.”
Inside the capsule, LK was the first subsurface sample of an asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency confirmed that the 16-inch container went down at about 4:37 a.m. local time on a flat, ocher plain in the Wumera Prohibited Area (WPA), 200 miles southeast of Kuber Paddy.
The landing was the culmination of a decade of work done by JAXA scientists and engineers, and it came six years after Hayabusa 2, which landed on Earth with the size of two washing machines. The spacecraft spent more than a year on a near-8 billion mile journey to the nearest planet, Rayugu, and on a rear trip, using special cameras, radar and infrared imagers to survey the spinning top-shaped rock. On two occasions in 2019, he briefly collected samples from the surface in a snatch-and-go maneuver.
Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director of the Jakani Institute for Space and Astronomical Sciences, says the mission is one of the defining moments of his life, and as it approached, it was clear that the spectacular end and recovery operation would be Butterwit.
“This is the last time we’ll all be together,” Fujimoto said.
But this mission is not over yet. Recovery of the capsule took place in the early darkness and storage of the capsule was confirmed as early as December. Preliminary analysis was done in Woomera. The team then sent the capsule from Australia via a chartered flight to Japan, where it will be taken to JX for further analysis.
Outback adventure
The Australian Australian Space Agency and the country’s Department of Defense played a significant role in the safe return of the capsule. The Department of Defense operates the Woomera Prohibited Area, a vast landmass, about half the size of the UK, where the capsule was guided after being released from Haibusa 2 on Saturday. Residents continued to pass through the region for about 12 hours as the road was closed as a precautionary measure.
JXA engineers tightened the space landing zone to a tenth of its size, with some skillful maneuvering as the spacecraft returned to Earth.
This sample per second into the Earth’s atmosphere.5. entered at a speed of miles, but hitting the galaxy in the air, he slowly reached 110 yards, threw off his heat and deployed his parachute. After gliding for about 20 minutes, it landed on the WPA’s red, Mars-like plains.
To help locate the sample capsule, members of the defense force began burning into the atmosphere, tracking it with ground cameras and radar. This enabled the JXA team to find the sample and send its helicopter team to and from the flight at 7:00 a.m. Fly7, the first person to have the honor of touching the capsule was a security officer, Satoro Nakazawa said of the mission.
Once he retrieved the capsule, the recovery team rushed him to a pop-up lab at the Woomera Range Operations Center, known as the Quick Look facility or QLF.
What’s in a box?
The team estimates that the Hybusa 2 collected about one gram of material from Rayugu, based on observations from the spacecraft’s cameras. The exact capture of the two heroes of Hayabusa 2 is expected to be confirmed next week.
JXA’s expert retrieval team found the capsule at 3:34 a.m. local time and took it back to QLF for testing. All operations ended at 6:01 a.m. “Operation was complete,” according to JXA’s Haibusa 2 Twitter account. Read the tweet.
Hajime Yano, a scientist at the Institute for Space and Astronomical Sciences, says the sample capsule will not be opened until the ISAS facility returns to Japan. However, a device that could measure small amounts of gas in a sample was erected inside the QLF to perform the first analysis of the capsule.
The facility includes a clean room, and staff must be dressed in protective gear from toe to head – not because of some long-term unfamiliar planetary disease concern or not. COVID-19 But to protect the sample from any contamination. Upon returning, Yano and his team punched the bottom of the capsule to find any residual gas. According to Fujimoto, in a preliminary analysis by the team, gas was found in the sample, but he could not confirm whether it was caused by Raigad or contaminated by a subsequent landing.
“The capsule’s sealing capacity is great,” he said Monday. “Unless they bring the samples back to the curation facility within 100 hours, there will be little contamination as promised at the start of the project.”
The sample capsule was loaded into the plane when returning to Japan.
JXA
The plane carrying the sample capsule landed at Japan’s Haneda Airport at 7:20 a.m. local time on Tuesday. The capsule was unloaded from the plane and taken to the ISAS facility at Sagamihara at 11:27 a.m. – within 100 hours. One of the scientists who met him was Susuda Yuchi, the project manager on the mission.
“I really moved,” he said in comments he translated at a press conference on Tuesday. “I’m really happy and excited. This is the starting point of the new science and I’m very happy that Hayabusa can contribute to it.”
The analysis of the gas will continue but it may be a little longer before the capsule is officially cracked. Fujimoto says it’s likely to happen sometime around December 20th. The capsule will be carefully disassembled and then moved to a clean room where the sample will be processed and opened in vacuum conditions at JXA’s Sagamihara campus.
The inclusion of the capsule is expected to improve our understanding of the early solar system and the Earth.
Previous observations of Ryugu by Haibusa 2 have suggested that there are traces of water-bearing minerals within the planet. Some scientists believe that water was brought to the surface of the earth and, possibly, how organic matter rained down on the early planet and life began here.
Return to Woomera
Many members of the JXA team will now focus on Mars’ two moons Phobos and Demos. The Martian Moons Exploration Mission is scheduled to begin in 2024, and samples from the Phobos surface will return by 2029.
The mission will feature partnerships with NASA, the French Space Agency and the European Space Agency. It also features another major partner: Australia Australia. Although not officially confirmed, Fujimoto has indicated that those samples will also come down in the outback.
“From my experience this time around, I’m really inclined to have Woomera as a landing place,” he said. “We want to continue to collaborate.”
Fujimoto says JXA’s interests and those of the Australian Australian Space Agency are closely aligned. ASA chief Megan Clark is keen to continue the relationship between Japan and Australia, with the country’s new agency growing.
“International partnerships are important to us,” he said. “Without the depth of international partnership, we can transform our own space industry and not create employment here.”
The sample return mission to Haibusa 2 is over, but the spacecraft has not retired. JXA engineers and scientists will begin investigating two more asteroids in the next decade. And the works may also have another hibiscus mission. JAXA employees have left tantalizing signs that this could be a trilogy in the future. Shall we see a hibus 3? That is a different possibility.
7 December. Update: Fujimoto’s comments on gas analysis, information from the press conference of Tasuda Yuchini.
