Hayabusa’s Spectacular Return

Hayabusa lights up the outback sky on return (JAXA)

Right on schedule, at 11:51pm on June 13, the Hayabusa spacecraft put on a spectacular skyshow on its return to the Woomera Prohibited Area in the South Australian outback.

The spacecraft separated from its capsule as planned, and as you can see in the video, the spacecraft broke apart and burnt up on re-entry, leaving the capsule to float gently down on its parachute for a soft landing. Furthermore, the capsule then broadcast its location back to the search team, allowing them to find it by helicopter reasonably quickly in the vast Woomera test range.

 Hayabusa and parachute when first spotted (JAXA)

The capsule has been deemed “intact”, and will now be taken back to Japan to the eager scientists who will now open it to determine if any Asteroid dust or gas was captured.

 Hayabusa up close when being recovered (JAXA)

The original video from the NASA tracking aircraft can be found here.

The countdown to Hayabusa continues

If all goes well, on sunday night at about 11:30pm local time, the Hayabusa spacecraft will be floating gently down to Woomera on its parachute that will deploy at about 10km altitude.

As I've blogged on before, the Hayabusa spacecraft will also hopefully contain some dust samples from the asteroid Itokawa, after overcoming a series of major problems to limp back to Earth, in what could be described as simply amazing engineering on behalf of the JAXA engineers.

Both Japan and NASA will be sending down sensitive tracking equipment to track the spacecraft on reentry, with scientists including Professor Trevor Ireland from the Australian National University eagerly awaiting to see the results.

For those wanting to follow the mission live, the Hayabusa site can be found here.

JAXA's Hayabusa spacecraft to land at Woomera

The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA)'s Hayabusa spacecraft will be landing in the Woomera Prohibited Area in South Australia in June. In doing so, the Hayabusa spacecraft will be the first spacecraft to perform an Asteroid sample return mission.

Launched in May of 2003, the spacecraft met up with the Itokawa asteroid in 2005. Whilst its sample mission was not fully successful, it is highly likely that some asteroid material has entered into the sample chamber, and will be able to be analysed upon landing.

Australia will be playing a significant role in assisting JAXA in the spacecraft landing and recovery, particularly through the Woomera range support activities. I'd also be interested to find out which government departments are actually involved in the coordination - clearly Innovation and Defence, but who is doing what?

Both the Innovation Minister Kim Carr, and Defence Minister John Faulkner issued a joint ministerial media release on the Hayabusa landing which can be found here.

Another good step in the ever increasing pace of Australian Space activities.

Good luck to everyone involved in the landing!