After travelling four billion miles in seven years :

Space Explorer Returns

Chamari Senanayake

A Japanese space capsule called ‘Hayabusa Explorer’ returned to Earth after a long seven-year, 4 billion mile journey. This space capsule may contain the first ever-asteroid samples that could provide clues into the evolution of the solar system.

Burning apart on re-entry to our atmosphere in a spectacular fireball just after jettisoning, the capsule was recovered by a team of scientists that flew in to Australian countryside on 15th of June.

It was the first time a spacecraft successfully landed on an asteroid and returned to Earth. Seiichi Sakamoto of the ‘Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’, which launched the explorer in 2003, said they were ‘delighted’ to recover the capsule, particularly after a number of technical problems delayed Hayabusa’s arrival for three years. He added that ‘Hayabusa’s arrival on earth is solely due to the fact that scientists never gave up hope and worked on every technical difficulty to get it back to earth.

Two helicopters took scientists to the capsule’s landing site in the ‘Woomera’ Prohibited Area, a remote military zone 300 miles northwest of the South Australian state capital of Adelaide. The capsule and the samples will be taken to Japan for study after a series of measures to protect the capsule and its cargo.

‘Hayabusa’ reached an asteroid called Itokawa in 2005. After taking photo images from all angles of the 1,640-foot long asteroid, ‘Hayabusa’ landed on it twice in late 2005, which was a great achievement for science. The craft was originally designed to shoot a bullet into the surface of the asteroid that would crush and propel material through a long tube into a sample collection container. There is no certainty the bullet actually fired, scientists say, but they believe the impact of the tube’s landing would have forced some material upward and into the collection chamber, and they have 50 percent chance of retrieving those samples.

The Japanese space agency said the aim of the $200 million project was to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system, as well as paving the way for future sample return missions. Japanese scientists also say that any samples from an asteroid, considered the building blocks of planets, could also shed light on the origins of the Earth. Scientists hope to study how and when the asteroid was formed, its physical properties, what other bodies it may have been in contact with, and how solar wind and radiation have affected it.

Hayabusa was originally due to return to Earth in 2007 but a series of technical problems, including a deterioration of its iron engines, some broken control wheels, and the malfunctioning of electricity storing batteries forced it to miss its window to return into the Earth’s orbit until this year.

If Hayabusa is indeed carrying any asteroid samples, it would be only the fourth ‘space’ sample return in history. That includes moon matter collected by the Apollo missions, comet material by Stardust, and solar matter from the Genesis mission.