Q&A with the ISAS Deputy Director General, Masaki Fujimoto, and BepiColombo MIO project scientist, Go Murakami, as we get ready for the BepiColombo launch to Mercury this October.
Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) officially announced that SPICA was one of three missions being considered for its M5 program. A joint ESA-JAXA mission, SPICA is a space telescope that detects infrared radiation. But what can we learn from the heat signatures in the Universe?
“The Northern Lights are movies,” says Yoshifumi Saito from the Division of Solar System Sciences at ISAS. “They show the activity of the Earth’s magnetosphere; the region of space where you can feel the our magnetic field.”
“I’ve built my career on designing instruments you could put on the top of a rocket,” says Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the CAESAR mission. “But these all pale in comparison to what you can do in the laboratory.”
“You cannot sign an international collaboration agreement and expect everything to just work,” says Heather Enos, Deputy Principal Investigator for the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission. “Each country will have different policies that the teams have to be pro-active in navigating.”
On July 6th, twin press conferences ran in the Netherland and Japan. It was the final chance to take a peek at BepiColombo; a joint mission between ESA and JAXA to explore our Solar System’s innermost world, Mercury. But what can we learn from a planet that orbits so close to the roaring inferno of our Sun?
On September 14, 2007, the SELENE mission launched from Tanegashima Space Center to begin its one-year mission to understand the Moon’s origin, history, and resource potential for human exploration. SELENE, also known as Kaguya, was the largest lunar mission since Apollo, carrying 15 scientific instruments and two small microsatellites. After release from the main spacecraft, which orbited at an altitude of 100 km, the microsatellites entered elliptical orbits to provide communications for SELENE and enable accurate measurement of the Moon’s gravity field.
“Hitomi left us with homework,” explains Makoto Tashiro, sub-leader of the X-ray Astronomy Recovery Mission (XARM) pre-preparation team at ISAS. “I hope XARM will provide the solution."
From sample return with Hayabusa2 and the Martian Moons eXploration mission, through to our instruments onboard the ESA JUICE mission to the icy moons, we are tracing how water and organics flowed around the infant Solar System. Yet, visiting another world has serious risks. How can we ensure we do not contaminate our destination with microbes from Earth? Similarly, we may bring extraterrestrial life back to Earth that endangers our own environment.
With the Epsilon project, JAXA is aiming to significantly lower both the cost and preparation time needed for a rocket launch. It is an essential shift if space travel is to meet the demands from an increasing broader audience within industry and the private sector.