Historical Scientific Mission

So far, man has obtained pieces of other bodies in space by going to the moon or investigating meteor strikes. That's all changed as of now. Japan has sent a ship into space on the hunt for asteroids. When it finds 'em, it'll bring 'em back.

The Muses-C probe was launched aboard an M-5 rocket Friday from the Kagoshima Space Center in the southern Japanese town of Uchinoura. It was the third space launch by ISAS, Japan's space agency, in the past six weeks. The first two were spy satellites.

"Asteroids are known as the fossils of the solar system,' said mission leader Junichiro Kawaguchi of Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. "By examining them, you can find out what substances made up the solar system, including Earth, in the distant past."

Here's The Plan...

In the next four-and-a-half years, Muses-C will rendesvous with an asteroid known as 1998 SF36, a football-shaped rock in space about 186 million miles away. After spending about three months orbiting and examining the asteroid, the probe will actually land on its surface, fire a rocket-propelled projectile into it, collect the pieces and come home. Upon achieving earth orbit, the Muses-C probe will eject its sample box. The samples will - hopefully - parachute safely into the Australian Outback.

Well, that's the plan, anyway. "Bringing back a sample is an extremely difficult proposition," Kawaguchi admitted.

The $160 million Japanese mission follows by four years a similar NASA attempt to collect, for want of a better word, "stardust" by flying through the tail of a comet. It's already collected one sample and is scheduled to collect another before returning to Earth in 2006.

FMI: www.isas.ac.jp , http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov