Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft reaches cosmic 'diamond' | Hacker News Reader

Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft reaches cosmic 'diamond'

bbc.co.uk

144 pointsgadders28 comments

Quietly, without much press as NASA, JAXA is doing amazing things. Sample return missions are rare and high end of space exploration. Last one was NASA Startdust 12 years ago.

Another interesting thing JAXA does is smallest rocket for orbital launches. SS-520-5 is 10 meter long, 50cm in diameter, 4kg to LEO and it successfully launched a 3U cubesat in orbit few months ago.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Series_(rocket_family)#SS-520-5

Closest competitor is Rocket Lab's Electron, 17m length, 1.2m diameter, 225kg to LEO

www.spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/electron/

The last Nasa sample return mission maybe, but JAXA’s first Hayabusa returned samples in 2010.

True, my bad, so yes, last sample return mission was JAXA's Hayabusa in 2010.

They did have some problems though: "... safe descent mode. This mode did not permit a sample to be taken, but there is a high probability that some dust may have whirled up into the sampling horn when it touched the asteroid".

1500 extraterrestrial grains had been recovered, comprising the minerals olivine, pyroxene, plagioclase and iron sulphide. The grains were about 10 micrometers in size.

Plus their lander totally flopped.

Luckily, this is an incremental upgrade to the previous probe, so it's hopefully less buggy.

Why was there a 17 year delay between the 2nd launch and 3rd launch?

People became less interested in the smallsat launch market for a long time.

Those earlier launches were as a two-stage sounding rocket. The three-stage variant capable of putting a payload in orbit first launched in 2017; it made orbit on its second flight earlier this year.

SS-520 is a one-off experimental project, not something they intend to put into regular commercial service.

Why not? I bet the'll have success with cubesats.

It still awes me that we can fire a probe at a moving object 180 million miles away with such accuracy and care that we not only reach it but have the probe gently touch down and then return to us.

There are always some trajectory correction manoeuvres in any deep space mission.

Yeah ... I can drive across the country and land in a particular parking spot with 100% repeatability.

Sure, but your motor-sensor feedback loop doesn't have a multi-minute delay built into it, so I'd say slightly less of a challenge.

As a counter-point to the counter-point, if we could reliably predict the actions of other cars years into the future (as we can with solar system objects), multi-minute delays wouldn't matter much.

The orbits perhaps but not the rotation (which can be improved in flight) nor surface conditions or surrounding "atmosphere", all being critical for landing. This is why chasing an asteroid or a comet is much easier than actually landing.

Well it is guided all the way but yes, it's pretty amazing

...yet some people who live in the same village as me can never remember which village bus stop they need to get off (there isn't many - we only have a 300 houses) so spam the village Facebook group asking for help!

I wish I was making this up!

Write their name on a sign at the bus stop. This won't scale, but you have not many users currently.

Does anyone know how they get the sample back to earth uncontaminated? I don't see any information on that in the article and that strikes me as one of the most difficult parts of the process.

Wikipedia doesn't have much information and uses a dead link as the source - The spacecraft is planned to depart the asteroid in December 2019, and return samples to Earth in December 2020.

The rest of the information I can readily find is in Japanese.

Presumably it's pretty similar to the first Hayabusa which is fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa#Recovery_and_return_t...

Yep - very similar to the first one - it's sealed in a strong aluminum capsule with a heat shield and parachute, and tracked with a radio beacon once it lands in the Australian desert (hopefully). Spaceflight 101 has more details, Ctrl+F "Sample Return Capsule": http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/hayabusa-2/

I highly recommend the JAXA twitter account for the craft - they’ve given lots of interesting detail, and it’s about as exciting as Rosetta.

https://www.twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa?lang=en

Even the guitar player from Queen likes it and comments.

Outside of Queen, Brian May is an astrophysicist, and his specialty is interplanetary dust composition. It's always cool to see him jumping in and sharing science with those who know him for his music career.

What's amazing to me is that this asteroid has an escape velocity of 5cm/s. Hayabusa 2 is approaching it at 9cm/s currently.

Gravity is such a weak force...

It is, yet the gravitational force from the Sun acting on the Earth is equal to the tensile strength of a steel rod approximately the diameter of the Earth itself.

(because while gravity is weak, the Sun is huge!)

It's 2018 and there is no pictures or video streams of the earth from space that can be verified to be genuine.

There are no real time cameras filming the earth on a level where we can signal to the camera and see it detect the signal in real time.

There are no videos of satellites in space taken from space shuttle or similar as far as I'm aware. All you find on Google is artist impressions and CGI.

Is there any way to verify any of this yourself without having to trust the space agencies? As engineers, you should understand the importance of not having to trust a third party.

You're trusting third parties every day of your life without even realising it.

You're absolutely right. For half a century the worlds nations have been spending tens of billions of dollars on a complete hoax. And all those satellite communication companies are actually using fiber optic cables and adding in a delay. And all those rocket launches that many millions of people have personally witnessed didn't go into space, instead they all crashed in a secret area down range. I'm surprised that such a massive hoax could go on so long with no one discovering it before you.

I didn't know the next version of Hayabusa bullet train can fly into space.

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