Ozaki Takashi / Yomiuri Shimbun
CONGRATULATIONS to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for the successful return of its Hayabusa spacecraft...which spent almost 5 years traveling back to Earth after (hopefully) collecting rock samples from the surface of asteroid Itokawa. If you've been reading online articles about Hayabusa for the past couple of weeks, you'd see how emotional folks in Japan were getting as the Little Space Probe That Could (click here to read about how the mission almost became a failure) struggled to return to our home planet. Imagine how emotional they would get if a JAXA-built Mars sample return spacecraft was heading back to Earth...
Anyways, now that Hayabusa has concluded its historic endeavor through space...maybe JAXA will devote more attention to the Venus-bound Akatsuki and IKAROS missions. Just because.
JAXA
No comments:
Post a Comment