Japan launches probe to retrieve asteroid samples - Taipei Times
Sat, May 10, 2003 - Page 6 News List
Japan launches probe to retrieve asteroid samples
AP , TOKYO
A Japanese rocket lifted off yesterday with the world's first probe designed to bring back samples from the surface of an asteroid, a journey that will take four years and cover nearly 600 million kilometers.If successful, "Muses-C" will be the first probe to make a two-way trip to an asteroid. A NASA probe collected data for two weeks from the surface of the Manhattan-sized asteroid Eros in 2001, but it did not return with samples.The probe was launched yesterday atop a 31m-tall, ¥7 billion (US$60 million) M-5 rocket from the Kagoshima Space Center on the southern Japan island of Kyushu.The unmanned Muses-C is to make three brief touch-and-go contacts with 1998 SF36, a tiny asteroid some 290 million kilometers away from Earth.It will then bring back a gram or so of the football-shaped asteroid's surface, the first space rocks to be gathered since the US Apollo lunar exploration program ended 30 years ago.It will take the 500kg Muses-C about two years to get there, but the asteroid -- only 690m long and 300m wide -- is among the Earth's closest neighbors.Japan's space agencies, though plagued by budget overruns and facing a major restructuring later this year, have recently marked a series of successes.In March, an H2-A rocket, Japan's main launch vehicle, put this country's first spy satellites into orbit. It was the fifth-consecutive successful launch for the H2-A, which Japan hopes will one day compete in the commercial satellite launching business.The Muses-C was launched atop the smaller M-5 rocket. Japan launched its first M-5 in 1997, and had three successful liftoffs in a row.But the failure of the fourth M-5 rocket to put a probe into orbit in February 2000 forced planners to postpone the Muses-C launch, and aim it at a different asteroid than originally intended.
A failure in its altitude regulating system caused a further delay and swelling costs prompted NASA to shelve a project to build a tiny, wheeled robot for the probe.The plan now is to gather surface samples from the asteroid in June 2005 and parachute them in a re-entry capsule to a range near the southern Australia town of Woomera two years later.Muses-C will first conduct a three-month survey of the asteroid from an altitude of about 20km. It will then move in close enough to fire a small bullet into the asteroid and collect the ejected fragments.To boost interest, the public was invited to submit names over the Internet to be sent into space with the probe -- 877,490 were collected and have been etched on an aluminum-foil wrapper around a grapefruit-sized marker that will be dropped onto the asteroid's surface.