Asteroid capsule located in Australian desert | Hacker News Reader

Asteroid capsule located in Australian desert

bbc.co.uk

156 pointsColinWright61 comments

> Earlier on Saturday, the capsule was picked up by cameras as a dazzling fireball streaking over Australia's Coober Pedy region.

Pretty much why the region was selected. it's a big empty largely uninhabited area already populated with field of view overlapping fireball tracking cameras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fireball_Network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAAF_Woomera_Range_Complex

But did they find it in a small town where everyone was dead, and it turned out that the local doctor had pried open the capsule? :-)

Huffing Sterno and crying like a baby will save us!

Awesome ref - and an almost exact fit. Loved that book and movie as a kid. Michael Crichton had an interesting mind.

And incredible attention to detail. I believe the whole book was written just for the description of sterilisation protocol )

“That machine, you’d better not let the AMA find out about it.”

“We haven’t.”

Coober Pedy ("White man's holes") is a fascinating place though, among other things it's where they filmed Mad Max 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy

I think you mean Mad Max 3 (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome).

I wonder if there are any pictures available of the dazzling fireball? Seems odd not to include at least one.

JAXA has several good videos:

http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20201206_fireball/

Some great fireball captures in this 3m video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNK6EW_v4Ag

The landing-spot pentangulation was done with 5 dual-yagi stations along the perimeter of the landing zone.

I suspect the team responsible for the capsule heat shield will get their first good night's sleep in a while.

The people who installed the accelerometers that open the parachutes as well!

(Yes, this is a reference to how the accelerometers were installed backwards on the Genesis space probe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(spacecraft)#/media/... )

A reference on that wikipedia article claims that the original phrasing of Murphy's law was: "Every component than can be installed backward, eventually will be."

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6301146

I find it fascinating that I can be sitting here doing my thing, while there's people somewhere else on the globe that are actively exploring extraterrestrial objects and even bringing stuff back to Earth. The contrast between those things, for me, is mesmerizing.

Clickbait title. capsule landed as planned and transmitted location. There was no search to “locate” it as much as tracking it.

Given the official statements describe the process as

"Today (12/6) at 03:07 JST, as a result of the beacon direction search, the capsule landing point has been estimated. Now, we will search by helicopter."

and

"Today (12/6) at 04:47 JST, as a result of the helicopter search, we found a capsule in the planned landing area!"

I don't think the beacon "transmitted location" and the headline seems accurate.

Not to mention the region of the world selected has a seventy year history of searching and mostly finding stuff that falls from the sky, it's part of the globes largest (land area wise) long range weapons testing complex dating back to post WWII British testing.

In the event of unexpected beacon failures, etc. there's a pre existing network of interlinked upward facing cameras and tracking software designed to assist finding rockets, meteorites, or plummeting blue whales.

You can see the helicopter search path on flightradar24 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/vh-syj/#263ad0f9

> I don't think the beacon "transmitted location" and the headline seems accurate.

From TFA:

> The capsule then began transmitting a beacon with information about its position.

It reads to me like it absolutely was transmitting its location (why wouldn't it? I have a GPS receiver in my watch with 1-metre accuracy). It just took an hour or two to retrieve it because they waited until it was light.

https://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20201204_ts4/

"However, a capsule on the ground in the dark will be very difficult to find. Therefore, we will search for the beacon signal, as mentioned in the previous article. Five antennas will be installed around the expected landing site, which will each record the direction of the signal. These directions will be reported to the headquarters and when plotted on a map, the intersection will reveal the position of the signal source (principal of triangulation). This method is the same as used for Hayabusa, but for Hayabusa2, considering the area we needed to cover and potential troubles, we decided to increase the number of stations by one and search with a total of five stations."

From memory they were looking at worstcase scenario of ±10km in a strip of search area. They were hoping to narrow it down with visual and other observations.

Guess we'll have to rely on other reporting to find out.

How long ago were these samples collected? Surely not the sample collection that happened only a few weeks ago?

It looks like the sample collection finished and Hayabusa2 started its journey back to earth in mid November 2019.

https://www.space.com/hayabusa2-spacecraft-leaves-asteroid-r...

Edit: I think the differing answers reflect different events. Hayabusa2 arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 and departed in November 2019.

You may be thinking of OSIRIS-REx, the similar NASA mission which collected its samples a few weeks ago. That's still on its way home.

June 2018.

You may be thinking of the (Chinese) mission to return some moon rocks that's still ongoing.

Probably thinking of this one https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex

It's really nice to see so many space missions going on - even at the same time! :)

We still don't know how much if any rocks it contains though. Fingers crossed!

The technician in the photo looks like he's wearing bomb disposal gear. What's the danger here?

Contaminating the sample.

>We think Ryugu is made up of super-ancient rocks that will tell us how the Solar System formed

A strange comment. I believe it has already been determined that Ryugu is a very young asteroid at only 8.9 million years.

I love how the guy is wearing white gloves, as they of course do in Japan...

Terrestrial contamination in this instance is a serious scientific concern.

Is this the first human-retrieved material that's not from the Moon?

I get that space rock falls out of the sky all the time, but is this the first time humans have gone and fetched some?

Besides Genesis [1] and Stardust [2], Hayabusa2's predecessor [1] successfully brought back some micrograms of material from asteroid 25143 Itokawa. This was much less than the original goal, but the mission was plagued by technical problems and sheer bad luck, so bringing back anything at all was still a major achievement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(spacecraft)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(spacecraft)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

No, the Stardust mission collected interstellar dust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(spacecraft)

Based on the last image it looks like the spacecraft dropped off the sample then continued back into space. Anyone know why? Headed for more collection?

It's heading out to asteroid 1998KY26 (ETA July 2031) after a flyby of asteroid 2001CC21 (ETA July 2026). It won't do any more sample collecting but take photos and other measurements.

That image is way way oversimplified. The spacecraft did not enter the atmosphere and head back into space. The capsule was released far away from earth, the action of releasing it placing it into a lower perigee that allowed it to be captured by the atmosphere. The rest of the spacecraft continued on the higher orbit.

The original Hayabusa 1 did enter the atmosphere - after suffering many malfunctions and other hardships it managed to deliver it's precious sample capsule back to Earth. But after all this, it had no more fuel left for an avoidance manuever like Hayabusa 2 just did. So Hayabusa 1 burned up in the atmosfere, sacrificing itself to deliver its precious asteroid sample.

This has been captured in what might be the sadest spaceflight related manga I've ever seen: https://web.archive.org/web/20100615002512/http://drawr.net/...

Even if you can't understand the japanese text in it, I'm sure it can convey its meaning regardless. And it migh make you shed a tear or two for the brave probe that fulfilled its mission agains all odds and came back home...

(Hayabusa receives the order to detach the capsule. She complies and then grimly prepares to burn up. Earth unexpectedly contacts her with one last order, to turn around and look at Earth. When she does so, Earth congratulates her for a job well done and warmly welcomes her home.)

Is there any risk of contaminating Earth with something “not good” that normally would burn up when it entered our atmosphere

The amount of space rock that naturally falls onto the Earth and reaches the ground is measured in tons per day.

Yes but that is disinfected by heat, these rocks were shielded

The heat ablates the outer layers, and depending on the composition of the rock it might not be a good conductor of heat, so the heat doesn't necessarily make its way throughout the rock before the hot outer layer ablates away.

The rocks that land can sometimes be cold enough that they build up frost on themselves, because they've retained their low temperature from space and started condensing moisture from the atmosphere.

Really? That's just the ground? Is it mostly a few bigger ones?

I guess 1 ton of rock isn't that much, but this is still a pretty surprising fact.

Just to be clear, I don't mean "reaches the ground as opposed to falling in the oceans", I mean "reaches the ground as opposed to burning up in the atmosphere". If we include the space rock that burns up in the atmosphere that amount is measured in the hundreds or thousands of tons per day.

There's a lot of rock in space, and the Earth is a big target. Tons per day is not a lot when compared to the surface area available for it to land on.

It amazes me that the Australian government allowed this "dropoff" to even happen! Australia and its ABF (border force) is one of the most restrictive when it comes to preventing alien agents to come through theirs borders. Now, to risk contamination from outer space, that's the next level of "alien"...

Imagine the capsule crashes into a water source or breaks up in the near atmosphere. Even if there's 1/1B chances there's some deadly alien bacteria in there that will wipe out the Australian ecosystem as we know it, just taking the risk of complete media paranoia over a crash is quite something, even for the Australians.

"...that will wipe out the Australian ecosystem as we know it"

You mean like Homo sapiens? :-)

ie some remnants of the venom symbiote

Does it seem like the first reel of a disaster movie?

See: Andromeda Strain.

Anything worth doing by Japanese technicians is worth doing in white gloves.

Is that thing explosive or something?

According to previous Hayabusa mission, the parachute pyrotechnics need to be confirmed safe

Humans are so very cool.

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