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NASA and Japan To Cooperate On Asteroid Sample Return Mission

Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC                 May 14, 1997
(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Junichiro Kawaguchi
Japan Institute of Space and Astronautical Science
Sagamihara-shi, Japan
(Phone: 81-427-51-3911)

RELEASE:  97-95

NASA AND JAPAN TO COOPERATE ON ASTEROID SAMPLE RETURN MISSION 

     NASA and Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science 
(ISAS) have agreed to cooperate on the first mission to collect 
samples from the surface of an asteroid and return them to Earth 
for in-depth study.

     Known as MUSES-C, the mission will be launched on a Japanese 
M-5 launch vehicle in January 2002 from Kagoshima Space Center, 
Japan, toward a touchdown on the asteroid Nereus in September 
2003.  A NASA-provided miniature robotic rover will conduct in-
situ measurements on the rocky surface.

     The asteroid samples will be returned to Earth by MUSES-C via 
a parachute-borne recovery capsule in January 2006, just weeks 
after a NASA mission named Stardust is expected to return 
collected comet dust samples to Earth.

     NASA and ISAS will cooperate on several aspects of the 
mission, including mission support and scientific analysis.  Dr. 
Atsuhiro Nishida, Director General of ISAS, and Dr. Wesley T. 
Huntress Jr., NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science, 
signed a summary of discussions outlining the cooperation on 
MUSES-C during a May 2 meeting in Washington, DC. 

     "This ambitious mission is an opportunity for two spacefaring 
nations to combine their expertise and achieve something truly 
fantastic," said Dr. Jurgen Rahe, director of Solar System 
Exploration at NASA Headquarters.  "The rover will be the smallest 
ever flown in space.  With a successful mission, we will have the 
first direct insight into the composition of the materials that 
helped form the rocky inner planets more than four billion years ago."

     With a mass of less than 2.2 pounds, the asteroid rover 
technology experiment would be a direct descendant of the 
technology used to build the Sojourner rover due to land on Mars 
with the Mars Pathfinder lander on July 4 of this year.  The rover 
will carry two science instruments: a visible imaging camera and a 
near-infrared point spectrometer.  It will be designed and built 
by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. 

     Other U.S. contributions to MUSES-C include testing of its 
reentry capsule heat shield at NASA's Ames Research Center, 
Mountain View, CA, and navigation and tracking support from the 
ground-based Deep Space Network.  NASA also will provide co-
investigators to join in the mission's science, and the Agency 
will share in access to the asteroid samples. 

     Nereus is a small, near-Earth asteroid roughly one mile in 
diameter.  It was discovered in 1982.  At its closest point to the 
Sun, its orbit takes it just inside the orbit of the Earth. 

     MUSES-C will continue a recent string of missions focused on 
asteroids.  NASA's Galileo mission, now in looping orbit around 
Jupiter, flew by two asteroids -- Gaspra and Ida -- on its way to 
the giant gas planet, discovering a small moonlet around one of 
them. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, a NASA 
Discovery Program mission built and operated by the Johns Hopkins 
University's Applied Physics Laboratory, will fly by the asteroid 
Mathilde on June 27 on its way to orbit the large asteroid Eros in 1999.

                           -end-