Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Diane Sawyer." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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MONTHLY ARCHIVES
Japanese Probe Returns from Space With Asteroid Samples
November 16, 2010 1:29 PM
"We are stardust, we are golden,/We are billion-year-old carbon...."
With apologies to Joni Mitchell, the stardust headlines today belong to a Japanese space probe called Hayabusa, which returned safely to earth in June after a voyage of seven years and four billion miles in space. In 2005 it touched down twice on a small asteroid called Itokawa (image above; click on it to enlarge). Today, project scientists confirmed that dust collected by the ship is from there.
"These results have exceeded our expectations. I'm not sure how you express something that surpasses your dreams, but I'm filled with emotion," said project chief Junichiro Kawaguchi.
It was a long, complicated, and, at times, heart-stopping mission for the Japanese. In U.S. dollars, it cost about $200 million. In return, scientists at JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, say the ship's sample container came back with about 1,500 microscopic grains of rock -- not much, but they are clearly different from earthly rock, and may have formed as the solar system did, more than 4.6 billion years ago.
Asteroid Itokawa is a lopsided piece of rock only about 1,500 feet long, following an elliptical path (diagram above from JAXA; click on it to enlarge) roughly between the orbits of the earth and Mars. Hayabusa was designed to touch it (its gravity was not strong enough for a real landing) and hit it with a projectile that would kick up dust from its surface. The ship had its problems; it lost contact with Earth for two months, and mission managers never were sure the projectile fired. But apparently its collection tube contained asteroid soil nevertheless.
This is only the fourth place in the cosmos from which samples have been returned. The first were the Apollo moon samples. In the last decade, the U.S. has brought back solar particles on a ship called Genesis, and comet debris from a probe that was artfully named...Stardust.
November 16, 2010 in Current Affairs, Science, Space, Technology, Travel | Permalink | Share | User Comments (1)
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$200 mil? That's pretty cheap for such a lengthy involved project. Why can Japan keep a high standard of living and still support such programs while we look like a third world country?
Posted by: rwsmith | Nov 16, 2010 8:23:24 PM
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