6/18/2008 - AFS and Space Exploration: Dr. Hajime Yano of Japan and His Work on Hayabusa's Sampler
”Our imagination is limited by our experiences on the terrestrial environment. Through the Hayabusa Mission I feel that I was given access to some secrets about the solar system, formation not through a story written with the aid of human logic or imagination, but directly from the Universe herself”.
—Dr. Yano
Many AFS Returnees have been involved with Space and Astronautical Science. In addition to astronauts who fly missions in Space and make the headlines, dedicated scientists conduct the space exploration to reveal the mysteries of the structure and evolution of the universe, the processes of planet formation, and the origin of life. Among them is Dr. Hajime Yano from Tokyo. Dr. Yano is an AFS Returnee who was hosted in Wallingford, Connecticut and attended Mark T. Sheehan High School in 1984-85.
Dr. Yano is one of the leading researchers of the Hayabusa (MUSES-C) spacecraft mission to asteroid 25143 “Itokawa” (the mission has been launched in May 2003; it headed back to Earth in April 2007, and is scheduled to arrive to Australia in June 2010). The Hayabusa Mission is aimed to collect fragments of surface materials of an asteroid and to investigate the mysteries of the birth of the solar system. The Hayabusa Mission is the world’s first attempt at collecting samples from the surface of any celestial bodies beyond the Moon, and returning them to the Earth. The asteroids, are believed to be small enough to have preserved the state of the early solar system and are sometimes referred to as celestial fossils. A soil sample from an asteroid can give us clues about the raw materials that made up planets and asteroids in their formative years, and about the state of the inside of a solar nebula around the time of the birth of the planets. However small the sample amount may be, its scientific significance is tremendous.
Dr. Yano serves as is Assistant Professor at the Department of Planetary Science the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Kanagawa, Japan. He studied astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley and obtained his Ph.D. from the Unit for Space Sciences, Physics Laboratory, the University of Kent in the United Kingdom in 1995. Afterwards Dr. Yano worked as a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at ISAS and then an NRC research fellow at NASA Johnson Space Center (1998-99). He has been appointed to his current position with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in 1999.
Dr, Yano also serves as Assistant Professor of the Department of Space and Astronautical Science at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies. Dr. Yano specializes in planetary science and space environment science, and his research focuses on the solar system small bodies such as asteroids and comets, and meteors and cosmic dust as their fragments, as well as microgravity geology, hypervelocity impact physics and space debris. Since April 2007, he also serves at the Program Office and the Research and Development Office, JAXA Space Exploration Center (JSPEC).
Dr. Yano’s work brings all of us closer to the Final Frontier!
Read about the Hayabusa Mission and Dr. Yano here.
See the Hayabusa Mission movie
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