Japan launched a spacecraft that will bring samples from asteroid 1998 to Earth

יPenn sent a research spacecraft into space designed to bring samples to Earth from an asteroid located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Voice of Israel reported that the journey of the Muses-C research spacecraft will last four and a half years

Japan sent a research spacecraft into space designed to bring samples to Earth from an asteroid located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Voice of Israel reported that the journey of the research spacecraft Muses-C (renamed Hyabusa) will last four and a half years, and it is supposed to make light impacts on an asteroid that is about 250 million kilometers from Earth, collect particles, and then return. If everything goes well, in the summer of 2007 a small chamber from the spacecraft containing the samples from the asteroid will drop in the deserts of Australia.

If the journey is successful, it will be the first spacecraft to make a round trip to an asteroid. NASA's Nir spacecraft already stayed for weeks near the asteroid Eros in 2001, and even crashed into it and transmitted images of the crash, but it was not planned to return to Earth and certainly not with soil samples.
The unmanned Muses-C spacecraft was launched on Friday aboard an M-5 rocket (costing $60 million) from the Kagoshima Space Center on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan.
Iwau Shizuma, a spokesman for the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences, said that the Muses-C began to move away from Earth at a speed of 10 kilometers per second. Its solar collectors were deployed and the soil sample collection arm responded to the tests.
The spacecraft is also scheduled to make three encounters with asteroid 1998 SF36, which is 250 million kilometers from Earth.

It will take the Muses-C spacecraft about two years to reach Eros, but the small asteroid, which is about 800 meters long and 300 meters wide, is among Earth's closest neighbors.

The plan is to collect soil samples from the surface of the asteroid in June 2005 and drop them in a spacecraft that will return to Earth and land in the area of ​​the town of Woomera in South Australia two years later.
Muses-C will scan the asteroid for three months from an altitude of about 19 km, then it will get close enough to fire a small bullet into the asteroid and collect the material that will be ejected after the impact.
The spacecraft will return about one gram from the surface of the asteroid - the first space rock to be collected since the Apollo program to the moon ended 30 years ago.
Japan's space agencies, although financially strapped, are now undergoing a major redesign and have recently had some successes.
In March, an H2-A missile, the main missile used by Japan, put the country's first spy satellites into orbit. It was the fifth consecutive successful launch of an H2-A missile, which Japan hopes will one day be used to break into the commercial launch market.
Japan launched its first M-5 missile in 1997 and had three shadowy launches, but the failure of the fourth missile to place a satellite in orbit forced the planners to postpone the Muses-C launch.
A malfunction in the spacecraft's height control system caused further delay and swallowed up costs that caused the idea of ​​building, in addition to the spacecraft, a tiny wheeled robot that was supposed to roll and patrol the surface of the asteroid.

To increase interest, the public was invited to write their names online. 877,490 applications were received and the names were engraved on an aluminum plate that would be dropped onto the asteroid's surface.