Japanese spacecraft fails to land on asteroid
A glitch in communciations left the Hayabusa out of contact for four hours after approaching to within 17 meters from the Itokawa asteroid. It then drifted off to 100 km away from the asteroid.
Hayabusa was launched in May 2003 with a budget of 12.7 billion yen (just over 100 million dollars) and is scheduled to return to Earth in June 2007.
The spacecraft will try again to touch down on the asteroid on Friday as scheduled.
The spacecraft was also meant to leave an aluminum plate bearing the names of 880,000 people from 149 countries, among them US filmmaker Steven Spielberg and British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, on the asteroid.
Read more about the asteroid landing at physorg.com
posted by Unknown @ 9:22 AM
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