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The Japanese space agency is nearing the end of a journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the early days of the solar system and possibly provide clues to the origins of life on Earth.
But first, he’s going to have to do a scavenger hunt in the Australian outback.
This weekend, pieces of asteroid will land in a barren region near Woomera, South Australia. These are transported to Earth by Hayabusa2, a robotic space probe launched by JAXA, the Japanese space agency, in 2014 to explore an asteroid named Ryugu, a dark, carbon-rich rock just over half a mile wide.
The success of the mission and the science it produces will elevate Japan’s status as a central player in deep space exploration, alongside NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia. JAXA currently has a spacecraft orbiting Venus that is studying the hellish climate of this planet and working with Europeans on a mission that is en route to Mercury.
In the coming years, Japan plans to bring back rocks from Phobos, a moon from Mars, and contribute to NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts to Earth’s moon.
But the immediate challenge will be to search in the dark for a 16-inch-wide capsule containing the asteroid samples somewhere in the middle of hundreds of square kilometers in an area 280 miles north of Adelaide, the largest major city. close.
“It’s really in the middle of nowhere,” said Shogo Tachibana, the principal investigator in charge of analyzing the Hayabusa2 samples. He is part of a team of more than 70 people from Japan who arrived in Woomera to retrieve the capsule. The area, used by the Australian military for testing, provides a large open space ideal for the return of an interplanetary probe.
The small return capsule separated from the main spacecraft about 12 hours before the intended landing, when it was about 125,000 miles from Earth. JAXA will be broadcasting live coverage of the capsule landing starting at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday. (It will be Sunday before dawn in Australia.)
The capsule should hit the ground a few minutes before noon.
In an interview, Makoto Yoshikawa, the head of the mission, said there was an uncertainty of about 10 kilometers, or about six miles, in determining where the capsule would enter the atmosphere. At an altitude of six miles, the capsule will drop a parachute, and where it will drift on the way down will add to the uncertainty.
“The landing location depends on the wind that day,” Dr Yoshikawa said. The area that the researchers might have to cover could stretch for around 60 miles, he said.
The fireball trail of superheated air created by the retracting capsule will help guide the recovery team, as will the capsule radio beacon. The task will become much more difficult if the beacon fails or if the parachute does not deploy.
There is also a bit of rush. The team hopes to recover the capsule, perform an initial scan, and return it to Japan within 100 hours. Even though the capsule is sealed, the worry is that the earth’s air will slowly seep in. “There is no such thing as a perfect seal,” said Dr Tachibana.
Once the capsule is found, a helicopter will take it to a laboratory that has been set up at the Australian Air Force base in Woomera. There, an instrument will extract all the gases inside the capsule that could have been released by the asteroid rocks as they jerk and rupture on reentry. Dr Yoshikawa said scientists would also like to see if they can detect helium particles from the solar wind that crashed into the asteroid and drowned in the rocks.
The gases would also reassure scientists that Hayabusa2 did indeed manage to collect samples from Ryugu. A minimum of 0.1 grams, or less than 1 / 280th of an ounce, is required to declare success. The hope is that the spacecraft has returned several grams.
In Japan, the Hayabusa2 team will begin analysis of the Ryugu samples. In about a year, some of the samples will be shared with other scientists for further study.
To collect these samples, Hayabusa2 arrived on the asteroid in June 2018. He carried out a series of investigations, each of increasing technical complexity. He dropped probes on the surface of Ryugu, blew a hole in the asteroid to observe what lies below, and descended twice to the surface to grab small pieces of the asteroid, an operation that turned out to be much more difficult than expected due to the many rocks on the surface.
Small worlds like Ryugu were of little interest to planetary scientists who focused on studying planets, said Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director general of the Institute for Space and Astronautical Sciences, which is part of JAXA. “Small bodies, who cares?” he said. “But if you’re serious about forming planetary systems, little bodies really matter.
Studying the water trapped in Ryugu’s minerals could give clues whether the water in Earth’s oceans came from asteroids and whether carbon-based molecules could have sowed the building blocks of life.
Part of Ryugu’s samples will go to NASA, which is bringing back rocks and soil from another asteroid with its OSIRIS-REX mission. The OSIRIS-REX space probe has studied a smaller carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu and it will return to Earth next spring, depositing its rock samples in September 2023.
Ryugu and Bennu have proven to be surprisingly similar in some ways, both looking like spinning tops and with rock-covered surfaces, but different in other ways. The Ryugu rocks seem to hold a lot less water, for one. The importance of the similarities and differences will only become clear after scientists have studied the rocks in more detail.
“When the OSIRIS-REX sample returns, we will learn from the Hayabusa2 mission,” said Harold C. Connolly Jr., professor of geology at Rowan University in New Jersey and mission sample scientist for OSIRIS-REX. “The similarities and the differences are absolutely fascinating.”
Dr Connolly hopes to travel to Japan next summer to participate in the analysis of Ryugu’s samples.
Hayabusa2 is not Japan’s first planetary mission. Indeed, its name indicates the existence of Hayabusa, an earlier mission that brought back samples from another asteroid, Itokawa. But this mission, launched in 2003 and returned in 2010, encountered major technical problems. JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft, currently in orbit around Venus, which the Japanese agency has managed to put back on a scientific mission after years of difficulty. A Japanese mission to Mars also failed in 2003.
In contrast, Hayabusa2’s operations went almost flawlessly, although it retains the same general design as its predecessor. “Actually, there are no big problems,” said Dr Yoshikawa, the mission director. “Of course, the little ones.”
He said the team had studied chess on Hayabusa in detail and made changes as needed, and also conducted numerous rehearsals to try and anticipate any eventualities they might encounter.
Japanese missions generally operate on lower budgets than NASA and therefore often carry fewer instruments. The cost of Hayabusa2 is less than $ 300 million while the price of OSIRIS-REX will be around $ 1 billion.
Dropping the Ryugu samples isn’t the end of the Hayabusa2 mission. After releasing the return capsule, the main spacecraft changed course to avoid a collision with Earth, missing 125 miles. It will now travel to another asteroid, a small asteroid designated 1998 KY26 that is only 100 feet in diameter but spins quickly, rotating in under 11 minutes.
Hayabusa2 will use two overflights of Earth to launch into KY26, finally arriving in 2031. It will conduct astronomical experiments during its long journey into deep space, and the spacecraft will carry one more final projectile that it can use to test the surface of this space rock.
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