The Planetary Society has a blog with more information on the thruster problem that’s plaguing Hayabusa at the moment, and why it’s so important to get this solved quickly!

Listening to the Planetary Radio podcast about the New Horizons mission from NASA to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt and heard the principle investigator, Alan Stern say that they were hoping to find that Pluto had a ring system!

This is likely because its three moons (Charon and the two unnamed ones discovered earlier this year) have such low gravity that there’s a good chance that meteorite impacts would throw up dust that would escape the moons could end up in orbit around Pluto.

It looks like JAXA has got the thruster problem under control for the moment, although that’s partly because of the fact that they’ve put the spacecraft into safe mode.

RogueEngineer gives a translation of part of the press conference saying:

When we switched to the main system from the backup system and started the thruster operation, the same problem occured. Due to the attitude change, the probe automatically switched to the safe mode. After that, we controlled the valve to stop the leakage.
[…]

Because of the leakage incident, we are not able to see the detail of sampling yet. However, the sequence of the onboarded computer is confirmed to have executed normally. We expect the touchdown attitude was good, but we’ll have to wait for the completion of data downloading for definite answer.

Mr 5thstar translates another part of the press conference about the impact of this problem on getting Hayabusa back safely.

Fuji Sankei Business Eye: What are the impacts to the returning home?

Kawaguchi: We realize it is very critical. It depends on how we examine the situation.

Good luck everyone!

It sounds like Venus Express is doing well, with the Near Earth Commissioning activities all done successfully and now they’ve also commissioned VIRTIS (the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) and it has returned images of the Earth-Moon system back to ESA. The Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) has also had first light and returned images.

Found another blog where people are commenting/translating on the Hayabusa mission, there’s a comment there about problems with a stuck thruster, though it may have been solved. It also looks like the Japanese reporters have gone home, or at least for a well deserved lie down after living on energy drinks.. 🙂

The Planetary Society’s Emily, the BBC and most of the rest of the known universe is reporting that Hayabusa successfully landed on the asteroid Itokawa using the target marker (containing 880,000 names) that was dropped during the previous unsuccessful attempt on the 20th November. The spacecraft fired the projectile into the asteroid and is believed to have collected material, but that will only be confirmed when it returns to earth in the Australian outback in 2007.

JAXA has a couple of really interesting pictures (in Japanese) up here and here. JAXA also have an explanation in English of what happened on the 20th when they thought they hadn’t touched down – turned out they had, but not quite as expected.

Anyway, congratulations to the JAXA Hayabusa team!

Photo from Matsuura san’s blog.