Posted on 11/23/2005 7:26:09 AM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's space agency said Wednesday its spacecraft had successfully touched down on an asteroid 180 million miles from Earth despite an earlier announcement that it had failed.
On Sunday, JAXA officials had said the Hayabusa probe, on a mission to land on the asteroid named Itokawa, collect material, then bring it back to Earth, failed to touch down after maneuvering within yards of the surface.
However, the agency said Wednesday that data confirmed that Hayabusa had landed on the surface Sunday for a half-hour, although it failed to collect material.
JAXA officials had said earlier that Hayabusa dropped a small object as a touchdown target from 130 feet above the asteroid and then descended to 56 feet from the surface, at which point ground control lost contact with the probe for about three hours.
But after analyzing data, the agency said the probe landed on the asteroid within about 99 feet of the initial landing target.
The agency officials were still analyzing the data and will decide by Thursday whether to conduct a second landing attempt Friday, according to Seiji Koyama, a spokesman for the space agency.
The mission has been troubled by a series of glitches.
A landing rehearsal earlier this month was aborted when the probe had trouble finding a site, and a small robotic lander that deployed from the probe was lost. Hayabusa also suffered a problem with one of its three gyroscopes, but it has since been repaired.
Hayabusa was launched in May 2003 and has until early December before it must leave orbit and begin its long journey home. It is expected to return to Earth and land in the Australian Outback in June 2007.
The asteroid is named after Hideo Itokawa, the father of rocket science in Japan, and is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. It is 2,300 feet long and 1,000 feet wide.
Examining asteroid samples is expected to help unlock secrets of how celestial bodies were formed because their surfaces are believed to have remained relatively unchanged over the eons, unlike those of larger bodies such the planets or moons, JAXA said.
A NASA probe collected data for two weeks from the Manhattan-sized asteroid Eros in 2001, but did not return with samples.
I just want to strip mine as many asteroids as we can to piss off the enviro-nazi's. :) Poor mother universe... or whatever.
LOL
Oh STFU
Ooooh. Talent.
Wow! That's can-tastic!
Suzuki Motorcycles has a model they call the Hayabusa. Fastest production motorcycle in the world. 187MPH out of the box. I think I read that a Hayabusa is a Japanese hawk.
They probably said "30 meters" and the journo did the conversion to feet.
Cool!
30 +/- 10 is one decimal place of accuracy, presumably. It is assumed only the first decimal place, MSD, is significant... 35 is either two (35 +/-1) or one and a half (35 +/- 5) decimal places. 30.00 is four decimal places of purported accuracy, i.e. 30.00 +/- 0.005. The number of decimal places accuracy ~ log10(value/ uncertainty)+0.5
For some reason, it is common to convert meters to fee using the facto 3.3. For instance, when I buy a European mike cable, they give its length as 66 feet when it is really 20 meters.
Admittedly, it is odd. The exact conversion I calculate, taking the meter as 39.1 inches, is 3.25833..., in which case they really should call it 65-and-one-sixth feet.
< ]B^)
Hmmm...
Maybe those Japanese rocket scientists messed up somewhere in the feet-to-meters thing.
It's happened before.
Ping
There was a time when the Egyptians were only interested in stacking stone blocks and not drilling for oil.... not sure what that means, but I'm sure it will be understood in the far future.
There is just something totally ridiculous about this! Space ship landing on an asteroid. (Even though it will probably be very useful, of course.)
My neighbor has one of those... and he plans to buy a bike someday to.
Nice asteroid.
daijobu desho ne!
Yeah, but what about one of those English/Metric errors like the one that pranged Mars Observer? Suppose a tiny off-course push sent it heading straight for Tehran, or Mecca instead of into orbit?
Let's do it!
We can always say "oops, sorry" later.
You make a good point about the use of 3.3 feet per meter.
The exact conversion factor between "statute feet" and meters is 3.28 feet per meter. The older conversion factor between "survey feet" and meters was 39.37/12 survey feet per meter, i.e., 39.37 survey inches per meter. Survey feet are about 0.025% longer than statute feet.
The right feild line in Sky Dome in Toronto is 328 feet, or if you will, 100 meters. Both values are displayed on the right field wall. (Notice I did not characterize that measurement as being exact, precise or rough. I do not know.)
When the U.S. adopted the value of 3.28 feet per meter by international agreement sometime last century, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey already had over a century of accurate surveys using the older value. Rather than having to carry two values and introduce ackward notations on all its maps and surveys, they decided to continue the use of the older foot for the purpose of surveying.
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