Faulty Space Probe Seen as Test of Japan’s Expertise

The Japanese are calling it a small miracle. The Hayabusa space probe returned last month from a seven-year, 382-million-mile round trip to an asteroid, giving a much-needed confidence boost to a country worried that its technological prowess might be waning.
 
But Japan is still holding its breath. Did the mission accomplish its main objective?
 
Preliminary tests on a capsule retrieved from the probe have shown no signs of the precious samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid that the Hayabusa was supposed to retrieve — samples that scientists around the globe had hoped would hold new clues about the formation of the solar system.
 
Last week, the agency followed up with better news. Scientists had detected traces of vaporized material inside the container, some of it possibly from the asteroid, Itokawa, which goes around the sun on an elliptical orbit that crosses the paths of both Earth and Mars.
 

The June 13, 2010 return of the Hayabusa, which drew heavily on Japanese industrial expertise, has fanned hopes that this nation has not lost its edge in technology and manufacturing. The American journal Science has called Hayabusa — the Earth’s first visit to an asteroid and the longest-ever mission to outer space — a “trailblazer.”
 
Japanese companies hope the mission can translate to sales in the steadily expanding market for space technology.
 
According to the Colorado-based nonprofit Space Foundation, the commercial and governmental global market for satellites and other space infrastructure grew to $261 billion in 2009, up 7 percent from 2008 and 40 percent over the last five years. But Japanese companies so far have failed to gain much traction as prime contractors in the global satellite communications market.
 
NEC, which built the probe’s advanced ion engines, wants to sell its technology in the United States, to NASA as well as to commercial customers through a joint venture with the American aerospace firm Aerojet-General.
 
Ion engines use electric fields, instead of chemical reactions, to propel rockets and satellites. They are less powerful but more efficient than conventional chemical engines, and can last for years before running out of fuel.
 
The information technology behemoth Fujitsu, meanwhile, is aggressively marketing its communications systems, which are credited with guiding the Hayabusa spacecraft back to Earth.
 
And IHI, which developed the probe’s heat-resistance technology, says it hopes to build on the mission’s publicity to double revenue from its space-related business.
 
An expert panel earlier this year was appointed to advise the government on ways to help double Japanese companies’ earnings from their space businesses to at least 14 trillion yen ($158 billion).
 
“Achieving big goals is always accompanied with adversity; but where there’s a strong will, there’s a way,” NEC’s president, Nobuhiro Endo, said at a shareholders’ meeting on June 22, showing off a scaled model of the Hayabusa.
 
Japan, the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to put a satellite into orbit, in 1977, has since launched a string of successful rockets and has been intent on being a space power. But its aspirations have more recently been usurped by China, which put a man in space — a feat Japan has not yet managed on its own — and it has also incurred a series of setbacks, including a Mars probe launched in 1998 that failed to reach orbit around that planet.
 
And the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — known as JAXA — with a budget of about 230 billion yen for 2010 ($2.6 billion), is still relatively tiny compared with the United States’ NASA and its $18.7 billion budget.
 
Launched on a Japanese rocket in May 2003 the Hayabusa (translation: peregrine falcon) had a benighted journey. After the probe landed in 2005 on the Itokawa asteroid, which is about a third of a mile long and shaped like a potato, its sample-capture mechanism went awry. To the public’s dismay, JAXA officials said they were not sure whether any samples had been collected.