Outback landing ends seven-year space odyssey for Hayabusa

Outback landing ends seven-year space odyssey for Hayabusa

Around midnight on Sunday, in a sparse desert in the middle of the Outback in South Australia, a small capsule is expected to drop from the sky, ending a 3 billion-mile (4.8 billion km), seven-year odyssey to bring a piece of space rock to Earth.

Scientists from around the world have been gathering all week at the Woomera Test Range, an area roughly the size of England, which is the anticipated landing point for a capsule from the Hayabusa, a Japanese space probe launched in 2003 with the aim of collecting samples from an asteroid and bringing them back to Earth for testing.

If successful it will be the first probe to bring asteroid dust to Earth, the first spacecraft to successfully land on and lift off a celestial body other than the Moon, and the first space landing in Australia.

It will also end a remarkable journey for the Hayabusa, which has been so fraught with drama, including technical troubles, broken engines and dysfunctional batteries, that some scientists have dubbed the mission the “robotic equivalent of Apollo 13”.

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The Hayabusa is a car-sized spacecraft with solar paddles. It weighs 510kg (1,125lb) and cost 12.7 billion yen (£94 million) to develop.

The unmanned mission was launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) in 2003 in the hope of returning a sample of material from a small, potato-shaped asteroid, named Itokawa, to Earth for analysis.

The Hayabusa reached Itokawa, a 540m (1,770ft) wide lump orbiting 3 billion km from Earth, in late 2005. After an unsuccessful attempt to collect samples of the asteroid Jaxa scientists sealed the probe’s sampling chamber in the hope that it might collect dust that floated up when the probe touched the asteroid.

Scientists said that they hope these raw samples will help them to learn more about how the solar system was created and how to reduce the threat of any celestial object on a collision course with Earth.

Nasa and Jaxa scientists have arrived in South Australia to help to recover the capsule from the Hayabusa probe, which will burn up on re-entry. The capsule is expected to land around midnight on Sunday (3pm Sunday GMT).

Michael Zolensky, a Nasa scientist, said that the dust sample, if any, would be small, but significant for being able to reduce the threat of an asteroid impact.

“If you want to mitigate that hazard you have to know about the physical properties of asteroids, what they are made of, so they are important for that reason as well,” Dr Zolensky said this week before heading out to the Woomera site.

“It probably is going to return less than a gram of sample, at the most a couple of grams, possibly much less than that.”

Dr Zolensky said that it was unknown whether the unmanned mission had succeeded in collecting any samples from the asteroid, but scientists were confident that they would find at least some particles to analyse.

“Even if the sampler did not work ... as it was planned to do, there is good reason to expect that just the process of landing on the asteroid would have coated the inside of the spacecraft with dust,” he said. “When we open it up I think it is not going to be empty.”

The journey has captured the imagination of the people of Japan, who have followed the plight of the Hayabusa, which means falcon, as if it were a real person.

Thousands of supporters have left messages on the mission’s website, with many referring to the probe as if it was a human boy and cheering him on the final approach back to Earth.

“What’s special to Hayabusa is it has enthusiastic fans,” Makoto Yoshikawa, a Jaxa associate professor, said. “I believe ordinary people love it because it tried what is unprecedented.

As well as hopefully collected samples from Itokawa, Hayabusa left a piece of Earth on the asteroid — a metal ball wrapped in a thin plastic film that bears the names of 880,000 people from 149 countries, among them Steven Spielberg, the American film-maker, and the British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who had all responded to Jaxa’s public invitation to be listed.