A Japanese research probe moved within meters of an asteroid on Sunday, but officials then lost contact and it was unclear whether it had successfully landed to collect surface samples, Japan’s space agency said.
The Hayabusa probe, which botched a rehearsal earlier this month, is on a mission to collect material from the asteroid during a brief landing and then bring it back to Earth.
Hayabusa moved to 40m above the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa and then dropped a small ball-shaped telemeter as a touchdown target before descending to 17m, Jaxa officials said. At that point, they lost contact for about three hours before restoring two-way contact, Jaxa official Kiyotaka Yashiro said.
The probe switched to auto-control, storing data about itself and later transmitting it to ground control, which officials were still analysing, Yashiro said.
The probe has been troubled by a series of glitches.
A rehearsal was aborted earlier this month when it had trouble finding a landing spot, and a small robotic lander deployed from the probe was lost. Hayabusa also had an earlier problem with one of its three gyroscopes, which was later repaired.
Hayabusa was launched in May 2003 and has until early December before it must leave orbit and begin its 290-million-kilometre journey home. It is expected to return to Earth and land in the Australian outback in June 2007.
The asteroid is named after Hideo Itokawa, the father of rocket science in Japan, and is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars.
It is 690m long and 300m wide and has a gravitational pull of only one-one-hundred-thousandth of Earth’s, which makes landing a probe there difficult.
Japan was the fourth country to launch a satellite, in 1972, and announced earlier this year a major project to send its first astronauts into space and set up a base on the moon by 2025.
Examining asteroid samples is expected to help unlock secrets of how celestial bodies were formed because their surfaces are believed to have remained relatively unchanged over the eons, unlike those of larger bodies such the planets or moons, Jaxa said.
A Nasa probe collected data for two weeks from the Manhattan-sized asteroid Eros in 2001, but did not return with samples. – Sapa-AP