Author: John

Hayabusa – Asteroid Sample and Return Mission

Hayabusa

Now this is the kind of thing that I like to see in the news.

Here is some current information on the mission:
Hayabusa completes journey to asteroid Itokawa by ion engine propulsion

For more background…

…Scientists hope to gain an even better understanding of the physical properties and chemical make-up of the asteroid using Hayabusa’s instruments to locate potential locations for sample retrieval, scheduled to get underway in November.

When landing sites are chosen, the Hayabusa spacecraft can make up to three passes to attempt to capture a total of one gram of surface samples, or about two one-thousandths of a pound.

The approaches will heavily lean on the autonomous navigation system aboard the probe, which must operate correctly with little input from engineers 200 million miles away on Earth and cope with the extremely weak gravity field of Itokawa. A target marker will be released on the surface as the spacecraft closes in.

During each opportunity, a 16-inch funnel will first make contact with the asteroid, followed by the firing of a small metal projectile into the surface at well over 600 feet per second. Rocks and dust kicked up by the impact will be gathered by the funnel and fed into the sample collection capsule to be returned to Earth.

“It breaks the surface and ejecta climbing up through a funnel-like device are collected by a sample catcher,” Jun Kawaguchi explained.

On the first pass, it is planned for Hayabusa to deploy a tiny rover called MINERVA to move across the asteroid for up to two days by leaping from place to place in Itokawa’s near-microgravity environment. The 1.3-pound rover will take stereo images using three cameras, and six thermometers will gather temperature measurements. …


Ambitious mission hopes to return bits of asteroid

The Japanese Space Agency home page (Translated)

The Coso Artifact

Coso

As always, make sure you don’t check your brain at the door when you read this stuff.

In February of 1961, three amateur gem collectors dug a mechanical gizmo encased in fossil-encrusted rock out of a mountainside in the Southern California desert. They didn’t know what it was, and began showing it to friends and associates. Within a few years this thingummy, which became known as the Coso artifact, had assumed an almost mythic importance. It consisted of a cylinder of what seemed to be porcelain with a 2-millimeter shaft of bright metal in its center, enclosed by a hexagonal sheath composed of copper and another substance they couldn’t identify.

[ via Unexplained Mysteries ]
Archaeology from the dark side
If you still want to read more about the Coso artifact and want photos (and an explanation of what it actually is) , try here.

.18mm Pens

micro pens

I have got to get a set of these. My wife uses the 0.3mm pens when she writes letters and I occasionally borrow them fro myself. Its great, you can write as small as you like and still read it. The 0.18mm pens will be amazing, and yes I’m going to try and write on some rice (I’ll post photos once I do that)

It’s the UniBall Signo Bit 0.18mm pen from Mitsubishi.
There’s a pen war on Japan, in case you didn’t know, to produce the pen with the finest point.
Pilot came out with one having a ball diameter of 0.3mm in 1994.
Now comes this new player with a point twice the width of a human hair.
The pen required the invention of a special friction-reducing ink.
Mitsubishi has sold 4 million of the pens, which come in eight colors, for $1.75 apiece in Japan.
They cost $25 for a set of all eight colors…

World’s Finest-Writing Ball Point Pen – ‘The tip is so small you can write words on a grain of rice’