PROCYON
PROCYON — a 65 kg micro-spacecraft built by the University of Tokyo and JAXA and launched with Hayabusa2 on 3 December 2014 (UTC), to test whether a craft this small can work in deep space and fly past an asteroid. Its ion engine failed on 10 March 2015 after 223 hours, so the flyby of the asteroid 2000 DP107, planned for May 2016, was abandoned. It still photographed the hydrogen cloud around comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in September 2015 and passed Earth at 2.7 million km on 3 December 2015; no contact has been confirmed since that day. (Its position here is representative.)
Key facts
Mission & specifications
Mission
- Operator
- University of Tokyo / JAXA
- Launched
- December 3, 2014
- Status
- Lost
Trajectory
- Distance from the Sun
- 0.996 AU
- Computed from the cached position
- Distance from Earth
- 6,273,935 km
- Computed from cached positions
- Distance from Venus
- 0.294 AU
- Computed from cached positions
Mission
PROCYON, the PRoximate Object Close flYby with Optical Navigation, was a 65 kg micro-spacecraft built by the University of Tokyo and JAXA to test whether a craft this small can explore deep space. It rode the H-IIA that launched Hayabusa2 from Tanegashima on 3 December 2014 at 04:22 UTC, with a small ion engine and a camera to image hydrogen. Its ion engine began working on 22 February 2015 and failed on 10 March after 223 hours, probably from contamination shorting its grids. Without it PROCYON could not reach the asteroid 2000 DP107, which it was to pass within about 50 km in May 2016, and the flyby was abandoned in May 2015. It kept working: in September 2015 its hydrogen camera imaged the cloud of hydrogen around comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan called the first scientific result from a micro-spacecraft in deep space. It passed Earth at 2.7 million km on 3 December 2015. No contact has been confirmed since the operations session that ended that day, Japan time; the cause is not known.
- 2014PROCYON launches toward an asteroid on an H-IIA rocketLaunch
With Hayabusa2.
- 2015Its ion engine failsMilestone
After 223 hours; the asteroid flyby is later abandoned.
No contact has been confirmed since.
Images
No openly licensed image of PROCYON has been found.