Hayabusa (peregrine falcon in Japanese) is an unmanned space mission to return a sample of material from the asteroid Itokawa. The spacecraft launched from Japan seven years ago, and succeeded to land on the asteroid. It is now returning to the earth and will be landing in Woomera Prohibited Area, Australia today.
The final landing process of the spacecraft’s capsule carrying the sample will be brought to you on Ustream from the expected landing point by Institute for Education on Space, Wakayama University[J]. The Ustream live programming is available from 10:30pm to 11pm J.S.T., which is 1:30pm to 2pm U.T.C.
Meanwhile, Japan’s aerospace arm JAXA succeeded to launch the venus climate orbiter Akatsuki (refer to this related article) and a solar sail called Ikaros last month, and the authority set up a Twitter account for each of these three aircrafts and keep tweeting as though if they had personal characters for engaging people’s attention.
Masaru IKEDA