Thu, Dec 15, 2005
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.
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