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30th Anniversary of The Planetary Society
  

Planetary News: Asteroids and Comets (2005)

Japan's Hayabusa Arrives at Asteroid Itokawa

September 13, 2005

Completing a 1 billion kilometer journey, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa arrived at Itokawa at 10:00 a.m., September 12 Japanese Standard Time/1 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time/6 p.m. September 11 PDT.

The spacecraft is now hovering about 12.5 miles/20 kilometers away in a station keeping, heliocentric orbit.

Following this initial rendezvous with the asteroid named after the late rocketeer Hideo Itokawa, father of Japan's space program, Hayabusa will spend the next couple of months in the nearby orbit conducting detailed observations with various instruments onboard and capturing more precise images of the surface using its high-performance camera.

The mission team will then select target areas on the asteroid and dispatch a robot to touch down on the surface and collect one gram's worth of dust samples from three sites on the big rock, and return them to Earth in June 2007.

Look for The Planetary Society's in-depth report, with Hayabusa Project Manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi, of the Institute of Space & Aeronautical Science (ISAS) division of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), coming soon.