Posted on 09/13/2005 3:43:29 AM PDT by snowsislander
Under the gentle puff of its ion drive, a Japanese space probe is positioning itself for an extraterrestrial first: a smash and grab on a speeding asteroid. The Hayabusa (or falcon) probe has been chasing the asteroid since 2003 and has this week reached within tens of miles of its surface.
Scientists at the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science will spend the next few weeks using Hayabusa's cameras to build up a detailed map of the asteroid. The probe will close in on the asteroid and try to knock lumps of material from it to bring back to Earth.
"No one has ever tried this before and it is risky," said Mike Zolensky, an expert in cosmic dust at Nasa's Johnson space centre in Houston and one of the scientists working on the mission. "It's all new and there are no guarantees it'll work."
Asteroids, the cosmic leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.6bn years ago, are a mystery to scientists. "One thing we want to learn is just what they are made of, because then we can work out how best to mitigate against collisions from objects like these," said Dr Zolensky. "No one knows if asteroids are like beanbags inside, or like travelling sandbanks, or if they are hard, solid objects."
Hayabusa is approaching the 600 metre long, potato-shaped Itokawa, one of the closest asteroids to Earth. Scientists will, for the first time, be able to study an asteroid that has not broken up into meteorites and been scorched as they penetrate the Earth's atmosphere.
To grab material from the asteroid, the probe will drop a marker which looks like a disco glitterball on to the surface to help judge its approach. The silver ball, which will be left behind, has been etched with the names of 877,490 people who emailed the mission scientists.
A pellet will be fired into the asteroid's surface and fragments will be sucked up a tube and stored. When Hayabusa has collected all the material it can, it will return towards Earth, ejecting a capsule containing the fragments. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will land in the Australian outback, ending its 1,200m-mile mission.
"Asteroids are the building blocks of the planets in our solar system," said Keith Yates at the British government's Near Earth Objects Information Centre. "Around 50,000 meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids, fall to earth every year, but ... this is the first time we'll have pristine asteroid material to investigate."
It's "risky." The probe could get hurt.
Plenty more where that one came from. :)
Were's NASA?
Oh that's right. There trying to remember how to get back to the Moon.
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