Planning and Implementation of the Australian Airborne Observation of Hayabusa2

Planning and Implementation of the Australian Airborne
Observation of Hayabusa2

Hayabusa2 re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and landed in Woomera, Australia on the 5th December 2020. Although the re-entry time and date were fixed, the decision to undertake the Australian Hayabusa2 observation mission was made on the 27th November 2020 – only 8 days prior to the re-entry, following confirmation that a commercial business jet, a Falcon 900, would be available for the 36 hours prior to the expected re-entry time. This resulted in a very compressed timeline encompassing the mission planning, instrument design and build, and test flight. The additional challenge for this observation was the uncertainty in the position and timing of the re-entry. Our team relied on the publicly available data provided by JAXA for the planning, and the precision and regularity of updates of the public data was not known. At 1330 UTC on the 5th of December the team boarded the aircraft for the Hayabusa2 observation mission, and at 2000 UTC the team landed back at Wellcamp airport following the successful observation of the re-entry. The Hayabusa2 capsule was tracked for approximately 26 s with video and spectroscopic instruments. Using our measured data, and recently published acoustic measurements of the Hayabusa2 re-entry, we were able to estimate the full trajectory, and hence viewing distances and angles for our observation. This data enables the analysis of the spectral data to proceed, and when further information on the actual trajectory is published in the near future, high fidelity data analysis of the spectral data can proceed.

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