Source: NY Times
TOKYO — The Japanese are calling it a miracle. The Hayabusa space probe returned last month from a seven-year, 382-million-mile round trip to an asteroid, giving a much-needed confidence boost to a country worried that its technological prowess might be waning.
ut Japan is still holding its breath. Did the mission accomplish one of its main objectives?
Preliminary tests on a capsule retrieved from the probe have shown no signs of the precious samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid that the Hayabusa was supposed to retrieve — samples that scientists around the globe had hoped would hold new clues about the formation of the solar system.
Last week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA, followed up with better news. Scientists had detected traces of vaporized material inside the container, some of it possibly from the asteroid, Itokawa, which goes around the sun on an elliptical orbit that crosses the paths of both Earth and Mars.
“Hayabusa capsule yields gas,” declared one newspaper headline. “Vapor gives us hope,” read another.
The June 13 return of the Hayabusa, which drew heavily on Japanese industrial expertise, has fanned hopes that this nation has not lost its edge in technology and manufacturing. The American journal Science has called Hayabusa — the Earth’s first visit to an asteroid and the longest mission to outer space — a “trailblazer.”
Japanese companies hope the mission can translate to sales in the steadily expanding market for space technology.
According to the nonprofit Space Foundation, based in Colorado, the commercial and governmental global market for satellites and other space infrastructure grew to $261 billion in 2009, up 7 percent from 2008 and 40 percent over the last five years. But Japanese companies so far have failed to gain much traction as prime contractors in the global satellite communications market.
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