Image credit: JAXA
The Space Engineering Spacecraft “Hayabusa” (MUSES-C) launched on May 9, 2003, by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been flying smoothly in a heliocentric orbit for about a year using its ion engines.
On May 19, Hayabusa came close to the Earth, and successfully carried out an earth swing-by to place it in a new elliptical orbit toward the asteroid “ITOKAWA”.
The earth swing-by is a technique to significantly change direction of an orbit and/or speed by using the Earth’s gravity without consuming onboard propellant. Hayabusa came closest to the Earth at 3:22 p.m. on May 19 (Japan Standard Time) at an altitude of approximately 3700 km.
The combination of acceleration by the ion engines and the earth swing-by performed this time was the first technological verification in the world, both in the sense of plot and implementation.
After its precise orbit is determined in a week, Hayabusa will restart its ion engines to fly toward “ITOKAWA”.
Hayabusa acquired earth images using its onboard optical navigation camera (which is for detecting a relative position to an asteroid and for scientific observations) as it neared the Earth. You can find these images at the following websites:
Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS)
http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/index.shtml
Original Source: JAXA News Release
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too…
It’s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at…
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns…