Hayabusa Probe Arrives at Destination

david.given writes "The Japanese space probe Hayabusa has just arrived at its destination, the asteroid Itokawa, and is taking pictures. The largely autonomous ion-drive powered vehicle was launched in 2003 and was supposed to have arrived last year, but a solar flare damaged the solar panels causing a reduction in power. It will study the asteroid for two months before collecting a sample from the surface and departing for Earth, which it should reach in 2007. It's a pity that NASA's asteroid rover, which Hayabusa was going to drop off, got cancelled due to budgetry constraints..."

Gosh, real science over in Japan

[ReformedExCon]

I am impressed by the Japanese mission:

HAYABUSA's mission: to bring back samples from an asteroid and investigate the mysteries of the birth of the solar system.

And I am sufficiently unimpressed by NASA's inability to even piggyback a rover with this. There is so much science to do that doesn't have to do with rocketry, that doesn't have to do with sending people into space, that doesn't have to do with spending billions on a boondoggle space program that is more concerned with keeping certain government vendors in the money rather than actually getting real science done.

Mars Rovers: Good NASA
Space Shuttle: Bad NASA
Hubble ST: Good NASA
ISS: NASA can't even send people up there to rendezvous

I'm sure someone will want to say "what about that big ol' comet we blasted with our satellite. Did we get any samples back? Did we get anything new except maybe a little more practice at aiming our missiles? Not really.

Hayabusa looks like it's going to be headed back to Earth with samples. Real science. I just wish it were Americans at the leading edge of scientific space exploration.

While it is fascinating...

[demondawn]

..to get samples from any extra-terrestrial object, I think what is going to be most important out of this project is the ion-driven technology that propels the craft, as well as the re-entry capsule. Though it certianly might have been nice if they could have made the whole craft re-enterable; these things are far from cheap, and anything reusable goes a long way towards motivating people to supporting funding in NASA/JAXA.

Wow...

[MeatMan]

whoopty friggin' doo

Multi-Billion dollar spelunking expeditions in outer space. What could we all POSSIBLY do with billions of dollars right here on Earth to benefit us all right now? Hmmm... alternative energy research? Nah. Cures for debilitating and deadly diseases? Nah. Improving the infrastructures of impovershed nations? Nah. Teaching people how to farm and improving their ability to do so to help keep them from satrving to death? Nah. Let's use it to study big rocks that are floating around in a vacuum and are composed of minerals & metals found right here on Earth already.

Screwed up priorities by people and governments with billions of dollars to throw around on rock hounding in outer space while watching fellow humans suffer and die due to curable and stoppable causes at this very moment.

Re:Asteroids full of life?

[lheal]

"new chemical elements"

There aren't any elements left. We've filled in the chart already. Game over on that one.

There may be some compounds that we haven't seen, though.

Re:Wow...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think you are missing out the point that a lot of research is being done and money being spent on all the points you stated. I think it is shortsighted to stop all pure science just because there are problems "at home". There will always be problems "at home".

I wish humans would quit giving each other debilitating but preventable diseases. There isn't much that money can do to stop that. I'm not sure why humans should be wasting so much money curing a disease that people shouldn't be contracting.

And building infrastructures for impovershed nations, well, the problem is that impovershed nations are generally caused by not necessarily lack of money, the root of the lack of money is corrupt governments and/or lawlessness. There's little point in building necessary infrastructure if thugs are going to be allowed to remain and destroy that infrastructure.

Re:Gosh, real science over in Japan

[LnxAddct]

You sir are clueless about "that big ol' comet we blasted". you can learn just about everything you need to using spectroscopy, and we are examing the inner layers of the comet which required such an impact. Its one thing to bring back a small sample from the top and examine it, its another to evalute a comet as a larger piece and its interior. If you sent a rover to earth from some distant planet and only brought back a small sample, would it be right for them to assume that the whole world was ice, or water, or dirt, or filled with bacteria? Both missions will certainly tell us alot of things that we didn't know before, but NASA's mission is telling us a whole lot more about the composition and general structure. Japan's mission is a little more specific and narrow focused, which makes sense considering that space agencies typically know what others are working on (except for the chinese) so why duplicate work. One thing is for sure, if a comet is ever headed towards earth, NASA's mission brought us a whole lot closer to understanding how to neutralize the threat.

Who said NASA'a space shuttle was bad? It is revolutionary, just expensive as hell and slightly ahead of its time, even more so then government projects like Arpanet were. As far as ISS goes, the only reason that thing is even in orbit is because of NASA. 6 space agencies claim to be apart of the project, but the only two that have ever done anything are the Russians and Americans. The Americans are also responsible for taking up just about every part of the station, the Russians took up 3. If NASA ever had trouble sending people up, it was simply because of red tape and senseless bureaucracy, the russians are a bit less worried about people dying. Everybody knocks NASA, but they are one of the few space agencies that does kickass things on a regular basis. Sure they could do something cool once and then never again and their saftey record could be perfect, but that isn't the point. Get your facts straight, the truth is that the majority of what we know about space is a as result of NASA. Of course the Russians deserve credit here too.
Regards,
Steve

Typical Slashdot Paranoid Illiteracy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's hilarious that slashdot is on the one hand a reliable bastion of mainstream science, pro-evolution, anti-intelligent-design, etc.

While on the other hand, the readers subscribe to the most bizarre ideas. For example, the parent post (right now the only post at score +5), bemoans the dangers of Japanese space probes bringing back "other elements" from "the galaxies and universes".

But this is only scratching the surface. You only need to browse a few days to find dozens of highly-moderated posts about secret Pentagon weather-control devices, [slashdot.org] diseases caused by internet telephonty and so on.

It would be funny -- even hilarious -- except that the readers of slashdot are actually among the most well-read and technically-minded people in the world. So instead, I must say, woe to the people of Earth!

Re:My tax refund is no budgetary constraint

[cfulmer]

Oh come off it. In the current market, nobody has 'control' of prices -- they're set by the laws of supply and demand. Demand is huge right now mainly because the red Chinese economy is booming. Supply, meanwhile, can't be increased. The result is completely predictible to anybody who's taken high school economics: prices go up.

When there's any blip in supply, as there was with the hurricane, supply actually drops and prices go up again.

And, in fact, this is what you want -- if the prices were artificially set at some level, we would end up with shortages and rationing: Retirees would still be able to go out crusing on the weekends with their ration, but delivery trucks wouldn't have enough to make their rounds.

There are certainly people making a mint on this -- the cost of production has not gone up much. But, there was no way for any oil company/country to engineer this.

As for your tirade about the tax cuts.... As a percentage of the total tax relief, only a small portion went to the "millionaires" -- much more went to those w/ annual incomes under $100K/yr. Person-for-person however, millionaires got more (because they pay substantially higher taxes than the rest of us and thus benefit most from any tax cut), but there are far fewer of them.

Re:Asteroids full of life?

[Trailer Park Boy]

Because the asteroids in our solar system are made of the same "star-stuff" that Earth is made from. In other words, the elements in our asteroids were made in the same star or stars as the elements in the Earth. So it's unlikely we'd find any elements in an asteroid that we couldn't find here on Earth. That's why.