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The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily Lakdawalla"Return of the Falcon," a new animation of the Hayabusa missionNov. 26, 2007 | 15:38 PST | 23:38 UTC
JAXA has released a 30-minute video of the Hayabusa mission, "Return of the Falcon," combining computer animation with actual footage of the construction and launch as well as images from the spacecraft of Itokawa. It takes a while to download but is worth a watch. The video is set to the smooth jazz sounds of Emiko Kai, composed before the launch of Hayabusa (then named MUSES-C) to express "people's interest, hope, and support for a successful flight. The music represents the hopes of all people supporting the mission as though it represented a Muse gently watching over the challenges of a boy named 'Hayabusa.'"
The video shows all the major events of the science encounter, including the firing of two target markers and the Minerva hopper. Minerva missed a landing on Itokawa, sadly, but it did apparently turn back and catch a photo of Hayabusa's solar panel, an image I had not seen before. After depicting the spacecraft's scary tumbling and recovery, the animation goes on to show the return of Hayabusa to Earth and the landing of the sample capsule, planned for June 2010. Amazingly, despite its damage, Hayabusa is still on course for the possible return of the sample capsule. It is still unknown whether that capsule actually contains any samples.
The video is about 28 minutes long and is followed by lengthy credits. After the technical credits, pleasantly, are extended credits listing all the mission's team members -- engineers, scientists, and all. Japanese team members' names are written in kanji. I can't read the kanji of course but I wouldn't know the names anyway; that doesn't really matter. Seeing the hundreds of names scrolling by gives you a sense of how many individuals contributed to making this one spacecraft fly. At the very end, credit is given to "All of the people of the world who have supported Hayabusa." On behalf of some of those people, I say, thank you to JAXA, for letting us come along for the ride! Throughout the movie the spacecraft is given an inner voice and personality through subtitles, something that would never be done in a similar movie by NASA or ESA. And, granted, it's a little sloppy to give personality to machines. But I applaud JAXA for inviting the public to have not just an intellectual attachment but also an emotional involvement in the "lives" of their robotic emissaries into interplanetary space. You can be sure that the men and women who were listed in those credits have felt plenty of emotion through the successes and setbacks experienced throughout Hayabusa's long -- and continuing -- journey. That's part of the thrill of space exploration, and I wish more members of the public felt such an attachment to the machines that now explore where we weak humans cannot.
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