Thursday, December 08, 2005

Hayabusa: Good News and Bad News

Good news: JAXA is now saying that on Monday they recovered control of Hayabusa (the spacecraft that landed on an asteroid), and can probably bring it back to Earth as originally planned.

Bad news: the widget that was supposed to fire balls at the surface so they could collect the rebounding material apparently failed to fire.

? news: they think that just the landing might have kicked up some material into the collector, that they might be able to retrieve once the probe has returned to Earth.

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