Gallant Daring
I was like a superhero, unfortunately my only super power was covertly using the iOS5 volume-up shutter control thingy. It is unclear how a heat shield that didn’t burn up in atmospheric reentry could be offended by photography, but alas, no photography, so this is the best shot I could get.
Traveling Space Science Expo
In all semi-seriousness, what’s up here is that the traveling Hayabusa science display was in town yesterday, and I managed to grab one shot of the craft’s reentry heatshield. The multi-day event included various educational displays, mockups, and a half-scale, though still quite large, model of the original craft. It was a very nice exhibition of a long-term space project in which remote controlled robots flew to an asteroid, scraped up some stuff, and brought the stuff back to Earth to do all kinds of science on it.
This is a very small town, the outskirts of which border on maximum Japanese rural-ness, so all props to JAXA and the local officials who secured a spot on the Hayabusa’s traveling schedule.
By the way, “Traveling Hayabusa” sounds like an itinerant Japanese karate/judo circus, right?
[Hayabusa – はやぶさ]
[JAXA]
