The tech media has gotten hold of this, but I’ll add my own context. The International Planetary Probe Workshop was held this week, hosted by Langley Research Center, in nearby Williamsburg, VA. The press makes much of OSIRIS-REx being an artificial meteor: we know the date and time, the location and vector, and even the size and composition. Therefore, studying this “meteor” calibrates our observations of real meteors. There was much more to the workshop than that- much more than ‘Look! flashy thing’, and not a first-person shooter frames per second. How many outlets noted that Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 also served this purpose?
138. Keynote: Mmx Is The First Step of Jaxa’s Mars Exploration – Masaki Dr. Fujimoto
By “probes,” the conference organizers don’t mean ‘space probes’ in the abstract, they mean ‘entry probes,’ i. e., something with a shell, a sort of heat shield. With Hayabusa2’s precious sample already secure, the next step is MMX’s return system. The Mars recovery shell is enlarged a bit compared to Haya/Haya2, not that that’s hard to do.
53. Development of Flash Lidar Sensor For Precision Safe Landing – Farzin Amzajerdian; Alexander Bulyshev; Pual Brewster; Aram Gragossian; Jacob Heppler; Frederick Wilson; Glenn Hines; Sean Laughter; Daniel Litton
Haya, Haya2, and OREx all carried lidars, for terminal approach and landing (such as it is…) as well as general science investigations. And so did NEAR Shoemaker. Lidar is a bit important.
28. Space Is (still) Hard! A Review of Successes and Failures of Recent Planetary Landing Attempts. – Ralph Lorenz
Hard if you’re not an asteroid mission. Hayabusa bounced, Haya2 and OREx succeeded, and even NEAR Shoemaker succeeded when it wasn’t even designed to land. (And yes, Hayabusa1 did succeed eventually, after bouncing.) Compare this to the Earth’s-natural-satellite track record, and certainly the Mars track record (though the Soviet effort for Mars does tarnish things disproportionately). The Soviet record at Venus is good, though, as is the US (not very many efforts).
73. Advanced Ion Thruster Design and Prototype Testing – Michael Silva; Periklis Papadopoulos, San Jose State University, United States
As with lidar, electric propulsion is implied by small-body work: when gravity is low (not one-sixth g, which is still planetary and not out of class) thrusts can also be low. Hence, the bounce by Hayabusa. The survivable bounce.
17. Effects of Gravitational Uncertainties On Controlled Small-Body Landings – Logan Feld; Carolina Restrepo; Koki Ho
Granted, low gravity (actual low gravity) is a mixed blessing. Low includes spots with lower, and not-so-low. NEAR Shoemaker was forced to grapple with this. But so do hacks at Earth’s moon. Lunar mascons are no joke, and lunar missions do not get to ignore this in their requirements.
52. Free Flight Test of A Hayabusa-Type Sample Return Capsule Using A Scientific Balloon In Jaxa’s Australian Balloon Campaign In 2023. – TATSURO NAKAO; KAZUHIKO YAMADA; RYOSUKE ONO; YUMA YAGI; HIROKI TAKAYANAGI; SOTA KUBOTA; YUSUKE MARU; YASUNORI NAGATA; HIDEYUKI MORI
Despite a track record (more than just “demonstrated”- one flight), JAXA is still looking for improvements to the sample capsule. After all, the OREx sample capsule flew on Genesis and Stardust, and still had a hiccup last year- no drogue parachute deployment. We are fortunate the main ‘chute opened without tangling, and was sufficient by itself. Continuous improvement is the JAXA path, just as Haya2 fixed lots of issues with Haya1 (itself billed, officially, as an engineering test only, as a hedge). Meanwhile, the Russian Phobos-Grunt sample capsule was so well designed, it didn’t even use a parachute, and eliminated numerous failure modes. (The rest of the program, not so much.)
Poster Session A
33. Thermal Protection Systems (tps) For High Velocity Earth Entry Missions – Hanah Alpert; Joshua Monk; Todd White; Ethiraj Venkatapathy
Asteroids in nontrivial orbits mean higher entry speed, and more demands on the capsule. The availability of better heat shields gives more flexibility to asteroid mission designers, and more Stardust-like missions.
70. High Altitude Cosmic Dust Collection System – Volodymyr Zhukov; Rae Chauvaux; Periklis Papadopoulos
…and let’s not forget near-space samples. Micrometeorites and interplanetary dust particles are raining on our heads constantly, it’s a matter of better collection methods. This is relevant to the conference ‘backwards’- the dust is the probe.