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.

So it looks like the picture of what happened with Hayabusa is starting to make sense, a very good summary of what happened is in Emily’s blog and Mr 5thStar (sic) has updated his translations of the latest news from Matsuura San at the JAXA press center.

The Planetary Societies Emily Lakdawalla is blogging that Hayabusa tried to land but JAXA ran into communication problems and that the current situation is unclear. There is more information over at website of a blogger (I’m unable to work out his or her name, sorry!) who has been translating the blog of a space journalist (Matsuura San) who is at the press center for the mission.

It appears that JAXA are in two way contact with the probe again after a period of only having a signal (probably just a carrier). The spacecraft was in safe mode, but as JAXA sent an unacknowledged command to go safe it is unclear as to whether it heard them or whether it did it itself as the result of some other problem. They still don’t know if it landed yet, but they do know that it isn’t attached to the asteroid. At first they only had communication via the low gain antenna, but then they were able to reactivate the medium gain antenna from which they are receiving housekeeping data and other telemetry which they believe will tell them if they landed and if the impactor was fired.

The Planetary Societies blog is reporting that Hayabusa dropped its robotic probe that was intended to explore Itokawa, but missed. To be fair to JAXA it sounds like it was a fairly chancy operation anyway, and they are still hopeful about attempting to dock Hayabusa itself with the asteroid to do its sample collection prior to attempting to return it safely to Earth.

The Planetary Society has a couple of pieces of interesting news at the moment, the first is that the Japanese probe Hayabusa that is investigating an asteroid is going to try again to land, drop the robot and grab a sample, though JAXA are still not certain what caused the craft to abort last time. They are currently speculating that it could be to do with the optical navigation system and the spacecrafts orientation to the asteroid.

There’s also great news about Venus Express – the Planetary Society blog says that Venus Express has phoned home bang on time and the ESA is reporting in their online journal that:

9 Nov 06:10 UTC, MET +02h 40m
Sun acquisiton and successfull deployment of solar arrays confirmed.

Well needed good news after the loss of the CryoSat ice monitoring satellite!