Posted on 11/19/2005 9:08:20 PM PST by HAL9000
Japanese space probe Hayabusa may have failed to land on the asteroid Itokawa, located about 290 million kilometers away from the Earth, Japan's space agency said Sunday.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said it is uncertain whether Hayabusa has landed on the asteroid, adding the probe is apparently moving upward after hovering around 10 meters away from the small celestial body.
The agency said the spacecraft, which temporarily lost contact with it, may have faced some sort of operational trouble.
The probe dropped a ball with a reflecting plate as a landing target from about 40 meters above the asteroid around 5:30 a.m. Japan time Sunday before the planned landing, according to the agency.
The agency confirmed the spacecraft was in the final stage of landing on Itokawa around 5:40 a.m., adding it had descended to 17 meters above the potato-shaped asteroid at that time.
After that, the agency found that the vehicle was trapped in a situation in which it could neither move upward nor downward.
The agency managed to establish contact again around 9:30 a.m. with Hayabusa, which is attempting to obtain the world's first rock samples from an asteroid.
It will try to have Hayabusa transmit recorded data to find out the condition of the vehicle and whether it has landed on the asteroid, which was named after the late Japanese pioneer rocket scientist Hideo Itokawa.
Upon determining the probe's cone-shaped device to collect rock samples was likely stuck in Itokawa, the agency ordered Hayabusa to distance itself from the asteroid by switching on a jet injection system from the Earth.
The agency lost contact with the probe immediately after this maneuver.
Hayabusa was launched in 2003 to travel to Itokawa to collect surface samples. It was the first attempt by Japan to send equipment to an astronomic object outside the Earth.
Hayabusa is scheduled to drop a capsule containing Itokawa rock samples to Earth in 2007.
Up or down... it is all relative.
Exactly how many people died because of this malfunction?
Hayabusa, of love, say what...
your too old for a bike like that !!
I know.....guys like me get Porsches....I got a dually.
I had bikes from 75-83.
Kawasaki H2 ..Kunis, Denco
Suzuki GS1100RS...Yoshis, Kunis, NO
GPZ TripBored ...the works....
and I've had the surgeries to prove it
(I ride my boys's 4-wheeler..lol)
There would have been no malfuncion. With the humans there would have been instant corrections...
I know i'da killed myself on a sport bike, so I got a harley...actually had a few of them over time. Then I had my third kid.. I had to say bye bye to my first love, so to take care of things with my second! Maybe one day I'll git another. Until then, I'll just poke around the neighborhood on this one...
little 4 speed does about 50...
It probably got confused by all the exotic place names and had to stop for directions.
Not to mention it the lack of experience implied in very time delayed operations. If they all kill themselves, they'd
just have to start from scratch again.
I think it may have run into:
In the meantime, the DUmmies are trying to establish George W. Bush's role in this matter.
did it fall apart faster than a chinese motorcycle?
Did it fold faster than Superman on laundry day?
Lots of successful robots. Every interplanetary probe for instance.
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