Kyodo: Japanese comet-lander that came home, came home with space dust
While looking for coverage in Japan of this morning’s two chemistry Nobel’s to Japanese researchers, I came upon at the Kyodo News Service an interesting bulletin: Hayabusa yield: extraterrestrial dust particles. That’s good. The Japaneses Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA managed the feat of landing their spacecraft on asteroid Itokawa, raising a cloud of dust there, and then getting its sample container all the way back to Earth. It took seven years in all – and many have been worried terribly that equipment malfunctions may have kept any dust from reaching the right widget.
No more detail here than that it looks unearthly, whatever it is in the container. But congratulations Japan, if so. And also to the news agency, which attributes the info to “sources” in the agency. Maybe a reporter got him or herself a scoop here, working the science beat.
Other (still sketchy) stories including a Brit space alien pronouncement:
- AFP: Japanese space probe may have brought home space dust: reports;
- Telegraph (UK) Andrew Hough: Particles from Hayabusa space probe ‘could contain extraterrestrial life’ ; Wow. This isn’t the Mail or Sun or some other tab, it’s the Telegraph. A little daft at times, but seldom utterly loonie, usually. So what madness led both writer and headline-writing copy editor to say maybe alien life rode to Earth in that contraption? And to attribute it to unnamed scientists. Even if somebody did say maybe there’s something extraterrestrial and alive in there, why believe such as thing is remotely likely until solid info is at hand?
- Akihabara News – T. Kimura: Hayabusa May Have Retrieved Extraterrestrial Samples ; Looks like a translation to English from something off the Yomiuri Shimbun, and not much at that.
- Charlie Petit
