Communications Lost After Thruster Malfunction Puts Probe Into Spin

An official with Japan's space agency announced Wednesday the Hayabusa space probe's original June 2007 return date will be put off for approximately three years, after a thruster problem put the probe into an unexpected spin as it hovered over the Itokawa asteroid it was sent to collect samples from.

The probe was originally supposed to fire its engines for the trip back to Earth on December 10. The spin caused the probe to lose contact with JAXA, according to the agency's public affairs director Yashiro Kiyotaka.

While the agency expects to re-establish contact with the probe and stabilize it, Kiyotaka said the agency is unsure how long those procedures would take. The new schedule gives the agency until early 2007 to sort things out with the troubled probe.

As was previously reported in Aero-News, Hayabusa has give the agency a fair amount of grief since it was launched in May 2003 on a mission to collect samples from the asteroid and return them to Earth. While the probe did land twice on the asteroid, the agency didn't realize it had landed the first time until days after the probe lifted off again; JAXA believes a thruster may have been damaged during the second attempt.

To add insult to injury, Kiyotaka added data received from the probe before communications were lost did not show a metal projectile designed to impact the asteroid's surface had been launched during the probe's landing. The projectile was intended to send up dust particles to be collected by the orbiting lander, according to the Associated Press.

Should Hayabusa successfully return to Earth with material collected from the asteroid -- a couple of big "ifs" -- it would be the first successful mission to return asteroid samples to Earth.

FMI: www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html