Hayabusa's popularity going up, up, up

The Yomiuri Shimbun

SAGAMIHARA, Kanagawa--A month after its epic 6-billion-kilometer mission ended in a fiery flash over Australia, the Hayabusa space probe continues to capture the public's imagination.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Sagamihara Campus, where the probe that traveled to the Itokawa asteroid and back was manufactured, attracted 7,894 visitors in June--a sevenfold jump from the 1,134 who visited the facility the same month last year.

Travel agencies have even arranged special bus tours to the research and development facility, and visitors have come from as far as Osaka and Nagano prefectures to learn more about the probe that possibly became the first to collect surface samples from an asteroid.

The facility is home to a full-scale replica of Hayabusa, and visitors can watch videos of the probe's tiny capsule returning to Earth and pore over a model of Itokawa.

About 1,000 people packed the facility on recent Sundays. During the summer holiday season, the facility has group reservations almost every day.

"It was an amazing probe that achieved something a human couldn't do," said Miu Nishimori, a 10-year-old from Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture. "I want to see a rock from Itokawa."

The neighboring Sagamihara City Museum is screening a film titled "Hayabusa Back to the Earth," which has proved highly popular. The film, which was produced for screening at planetariums, depicts the probe's problem-plagued journey by using computer graphics. On weekends and holidays, the museum's 210 seats are filled up more than an hour before the film starts.

Visitors range from families with children to the elderly, many of whom are moved to tears as they learn about how Hayabusa limped back to Earth despite a myriad of technical problems on its remarkable seven-year mission.

"Many visitors come back again, and some don't even have an interest in astronomy," said Tetsuya Uehara, a museum official.

The film is showing at 14 locations, including in Osaka Prefecture and Hokkaido. In many places, the film has been rerun or had its running schedule extended. Its distributor, Libra Corp. in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, has received requests from overseas to show the film.

"It's been exceptionally popular as a planetarium film," Libra President Kazushi Tabe said.