
Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft reaches cosmic 'diamond' - gadders
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44603120
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auslander
Quietly, without much press as NASA, JAXA is doing amazing things. Sample
return missions are rare and high end of space exploration. Last one was NASA
Startdust 12 years ago.

Another interesting thing JAXA does is smallest rocket for orbital launches.
SS-520-5 is 10 meter long, 50cm in diameter, 4kg to LEO and it successfully
launched a 3U cubesat in orbit few months ago.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Series_(rocket_family)#SS-520-5

Closest competitor is Rocket Lab's Electron, 17m length, 1.2m diameter, 225kg
to LEO

www.spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/electron/

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jgh
Why was there a 17 year delay between the 2nd launch and 3rd launch?

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rory096
Those earlier launches were as a two-stage sounding rocket. The three-stage
variant capable of putting a payload in orbit first launched in 2017; it made
orbit on its second flight earlier this year.

SS-520 is a one-off experimental project, not something they intend to put
into regular commercial service.

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auslander
Why not? I bet the'll have success with cubesats.

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mratzloff
It still awes me that we can fire a probe at a moving object 180 million miles
away with such accuracy and care that we not only reach it but have the probe
gently touch down and then return to us.

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auslander
There are always some trajectory correction manoeuvres in any deep space
mission.

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chronomex
Yeah ... I can drive across the country and land in a particular parking spot
with 100% repeatability.

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ur-whale
Sure, but your motor-sensor feedback loop doesn't have a multi-minute delay
built into it, so I'd say slightly less of a challenge.

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ceejayoz
As a counter-point to the counter-point, if we could reliably predict the
actions of other cars years into the future (as we can with solar system
objects), multi-minute delays wouldn't matter much.

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AstralStorm
The orbits perhaps but not the rotation (which can be improved in flight) nor
surface conditions or surrounding "atmosphere", all being critical for
landing. This is why chasing an asteroid or a comet is much easier than
actually landing.

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ConceitedCode
Does anyone know how they get the sample back to earth uncontaminated? I don't
see any information on that in the article and that strikes me as one of the
most difficult parts of the process.

Wikipedia doesn't have much information and uses a dead link as the source -
The spacecraft is planned to depart the asteroid in December 2019, and return
samples to Earth in December 2020.

The rest of the information I can readily find is in Japanese.

Presumably it's pretty similar to the first Hayabusa which is fascinating.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa#Recovery_and_return_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa#Recovery_and_return_to_Earth)

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dandelany
Yep - very similar to the first one - it's sealed in a strong aluminum capsule
with a heat shield and parachute, and tracked with a radio beacon once it
lands in the Australian desert (hopefully). Spaceflight 101 has more details,
Ctrl+F "Sample Return Capsule":
[http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/hayabusa-2/](http://spaceflight101.com/spacecraft/hayabusa-2/)

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madaxe_again
I highly recommend the JAXA twitter account for the craft - they’ve given lots
of interesting detail, and it’s about as exciting as Rosetta.

[https://www.twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa?lang=en](https://www.twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa?lang=en)

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maxxxxx
Even the guitar player from Queen likes it and comments.

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hypothete
Outside of Queen, Brian May is an astrophysicist, and his specialty is
interplanetary dust composition. It's always cool to see him jumping in and
sharing science with those who know him for his music career.

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Tepix
What's amazing to me is that this asteroid has an escape velocity of 5cm/s.
Hayabusa 2 is approaching it at 9cm/s currently.

Gravity is such a weak force...

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ISL
It is, yet the gravitational force from the Sun acting on the Earth is equal
to the tensile strength of a steel rod approximately the diameter of the Earth
itself.

(because while gravity is weak, the Sun is huge!)

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some_account
It's 2018 and there is no pictures or video streams of the earth from space
that can be verified to be genuine.

There are no real time cameras filming the earth on a level where we can
signal to the camera and see it detect the signal in real time.

There are no videos of satellites in space taken from space shuttle or similar
as far as I'm aware. All you find on Google is artist impressions and CGI.

Is there any way to verify any of this yourself without having to trust the
space agencies? As engineers, you should understand the importance of not
having to trust a third party.

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woodandsteel
You're absolutely right. For half a century the worlds nations have been
spending tens of billions of dollars on a complete hoax. And all those
satellite communication companies are actually using fiber optic cables and
adding in a delay. And all those rocket launches that many millions of people
have personally witnessed didn't go into space, instead they all crashed in a
secret area down range. I'm surprised that such a massive hoax could go on so
long with no one discovering it before you.

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Grue3
I didn't know the next version of Hayabusa bullet train can fly into space.

