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The Planetary Society Weblog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa released and communicated with Minerva...but it looks like Minerva missed the asteroid

Weblog Archive

The Hayabusa official website is reporting: "We have performed the touch-down test with success. We were able to communicate with MINERVA after its release." But the Kyodo news agency is saying that "A small probing robot released by a Japanese space probe Saturday toward an asteroid orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars may have failed to land and has likely drifted away from the asteroid, Japan's space agency announced." A further updated Kyodo news agency story states the following: "As there are no problems with Hayabusa, the agency will go ahead with its first touchdown on Itokawa as scheduled for Nov. 19 to collect rock samples in the world's first attempt to gather samples from the surface of an asteroid. The officials said they confirmed that Minerva was released from Hayabusa after sending a command to the probe shortly after 3 p.m. from the Hayabusa operation room in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture. It takes about 16 minutes for a command to reach the probe. Hayabusa was slowly approaching Itokawa, repeating upward and downward movements to avoid crashing onto the asteroid, and the command to release Minerva happened to arrive when it was moving upward, resulting in the robot's release at an unsuitable altitude and angle, the officials said. Junichiro Kawaguchi, a professor at the agency, told a press conference that the project team made the best efforts to calculate the right timing for the release of Minerva but that it could not fully control the altitude. "It is very disappointing that it did not work out nicely," Kawaguchi said. "We found out various things about the asteroid, so we will study the data and hope it will lead to the successful landing of Hayabusa." Minerva is transmitting data to Hayabusa as of Saturday night, but that will probably stop soon, the officials said."

So this is sad news for Hayabusa but there is still hope that Hayabusa may yet retrieve a sample from Itokawa. And even if it doesn't, this mission has been a remarkable technical achievement. No spacecraft has ever managed to rendezvous with and study such a tiny body before. Whatever else Hayabusa accomplishes, they have already done a lot to further future missions to study and possibly even deflect potentially hazardous Near Earth Objects. Stay tuned for further news...