Junichiro Kawaguchi
The Japanese engineer who led the Hayabusa mission, which nursed a crippled spacecraft home with the first grains from an asteroid.
Key facts
- Born
- 1955
- Nationality
- Japanese
- Field
- Space engineer
Junichiro Kawaguchi is an engineer at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who specialises in spacecraft navigation. He was project manager for Hayabusa, the first mission designed to bring back a sample from an asteroid.
Hayabusa was launched in 2003 and reached the small asteroid Itokawa, a rubble pile about 500 metres long, in 2005. In November 2005 it briefly touched down to try to collect grains from the surface. Things went badly wrong. The mechanism meant to fire a small bullet into the surface failed, a fuel leak drained its thrusters, its batteries failed and contact was lost for weeks.
Kawaguchi's team refused to give up. They found ways to steer the spacecraft using its ion engines and even the pressure of sunlight, and coaxed it home three years later than planned. On 13 June 2010 its capsule landed in the Australian outback. Inside were about 1,500 tiny grains of Itokawa, lifted into the container during the touchdowns.
The grains matched LL ordinary chondrites. That proved for the first time that the most common meteorites come from the common S-type asteroids, a link scientists had suspected for decades. Hayabusa's success led to Hayabusa2, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.
On the timeline
- November 2005Hayabusa touches Itokawa
- 13 June 2010Hayabusa returns home