Reentry of Hayabusa Sample Return Capsule and Post-Flight Analysis of the Recovered Heatshield

抄録

Hayabusa sample return capsule (SRC), separated from the mother spacecraft, entered the earth atmosphere over the desert of the Australia on June 13, 2010, and landed safe on the ground after passing through the excessively high aerodynamic heat load with about 14 MW/m². All the component modules of the SRC have been recovered by June 15. The present paper overviews the reentry operation and flight of the SRC and post-flight analysis of the recovered heatshields: The post-flight analysis program is planned by 3 steps and is under progress : The first step is reconstruction of the reentry flight trajectory and the flight environment. The reentry trajectory is to be reproduced synthetically taking account of the accuracy of the reentry orbit determination, the SRC landing point, atmospheric density and the wind on the reentry day. And the second step is to overview the SRC through non-intrusive method such as X-ray CT-scanning. The 3-dimensional laser-scanning has been also carried out for measuring the surface recession. Regardless of difficulty in the surface roughness, emissivity dispersion etc., 3-D surface has been numerically reconstructed and compared with the CAD data at the pre-flight.