COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.-
Japan still hopes that a wounded spacecraft designed to collect and bring asteroid samples to Earth will succeed in its mission, a top Japanese space official said Wednesday.
Kaoru Mamiya, vice president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said the Hayabusa mission to land on an asteroid and collect samples may succeed even though the probe suffered a fuel leak in 2005 as well as communications problems.
Hayabusa, scheduled to return in 2010, did get close to an asteroid and may have been able to pick up samples, Mamiya said.
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “We have hope.”
Mamiya spoke at a session of the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. He painted a rosy picture of his country’s troubled space program, which is trying to keep up in the Asian space race.
Among Asian space programs, China has sent astronauts into orbit, and India is developing rockets with plans to go to the moon.
Japan has sent astronauts to space on U.S. missions but has yet to do so on its own.
Japan was the fourth country to put a satellite in orbit, in 1972, but its space program has suffered setbacks in recent years. Its effort to develop a commercial satellite launching industry was dealt a blow in 2003 when a rocket carrying two spy satellites malfunctioned and was destroyed in mid-flight.
Last month, a Japanese government official said a spy satellite was unresponsive due to apparent electrical problems. Mamiya said the satellite was at the end of its functioning lifetime.
Japan’s other satellites are operating smoothly, he said.
Looking ahead, JAXA plans to launch its SELENE probe this summer. The probe is designed to release two small satellites to measure the moon’s magnetic and gravitational fields.
JAXA plans to send a spacecraft to Venus in 2010, and hopes to launch a probe to Mercury, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, in 2013, Mamiya said. Plans also are in the works for a probe to study Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Mamiya said he wasn’t worried about the gap in the U.S. manned space flight program posed by the scheduled end of the space shuttle program in 2010 and the first mission for NASA’s next manned vehicle, Orion, set for around 2014.
“The shorter the better,” Mamiya said.
