Contact with the spacecraft was restored, but it failed to land automatically as it was supposed to do after it lost contact with it in the morning. It is apparently within 100 kilometers of the asteroid. The Japanese plan to make another landing attempt on Friday.
Avi Blizovsky
Update time 16:00
Contact with the spacecraft was restored, but it failed to land automatically as it was supposed to do after it lost contact with it in the morning. It is apparently within 100 kilometers of the asteroid. The Japanese plan to make another landing attempt on Friday.
Contact was lost with the Japanese spacecraft Yabusa, seconds before it landed on an asteroid
20/11/2005 שעה 10:00
A Japanese research spacecraft came within a few meters of the surface of the asteroid Itokawa today (Sunday), but lost contact, and it is unclear if it landed successfully in order to collect samples from the surface of the asteroid. This is what the Japanese Space Agency said.
According to the plan, the spacecraft was supposed to make a crash landing on the asteroid, collect a soil sample and take off back to Earth.
The Yabusa reached a height of about 120 meters above the Itokawa asteroid, then launched a telemetry device the size and shape of a football down, which would mark the target site and then descended another 50 meters. According to the Japanese Space Agency, at this point contact with the spacecraft was lost for three hours. The spacecraft was put into self-control mode and the scientists are analyzing the data it collected. It was only reported that after that the spaceship suffered a series of malfunctions.
A general repetition of this landing was stopped about a month ago due to a problem locating the landing point and a small robot sent for a test landing was lost. Earlier malfunctions disabled two of its three gyroscopes, but these were later repaired.
We will update as soon as there is new data.
The probe sent by the Japanese spacecraft to practice landing on the asteroid was lost in space
The mother spacecraft will still try to land on November 19 or 25
15/11/2005
The Japanese space agency's mission to collect soil samples from the asteroid's surface and return them to Earth suffered a serious setback when a tiny lander was lost in space trying to land on the asteroid as part of a return to final landing. Despite the loss of the probe, the mother spacecraft itself is scheduled to land on November 19 or 25, depending on the considerations of the Japanese Space Agency.
The Yabosa spacecraft launched a probe named Minerva - the surface explorer robot - to the surface of the asteroid, but the Japanese space agency said that it appears that the probe has begun to drift out of the asteroid's surface. Minerva is expected to land and bounce around the asteroid to collect data using three color cameras. "Unfortunately, it seems that Minerva did not recognize the surface," the agency said in a statement.
Minerva was still in radio contact with the Yabusa on Saturday, and flight controllers were trying to learn more details about her condition and location. Senior officials of the Japanese space agency fear that the broadcasts will not be resumed. Nevertheless, Junichiro Kawaguchi, a senior official at the Japanese space agency, said that the probe nevertheless collected some data on the asteroid that will help better landing the mother spacecraft.
