At the 99th GRIPS Forum on October 27, 2014, Dr. Junichiro Kawaguchi, Senior Fellow of JAXA; Professor of ISAS, gave a lecture titled “Emerging Another Age of Discovery in Solar System enabled through Round Voyage Technology represented by Hayabusa Mission”.

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• Abstract

In 15th to 17th century, as the voyage and navigation technology had been distilled, the exploration era prevail in the world, and a lot of new voyage paths were exploited seeking gold and spices from Europe to Far East. It is called the Age of Discovery.
The space development started in 1950s, and has been performed for sixty years by now. And it made even human access to the other celestial body, the moon. Three years ago, in 2010, Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft accomplished the world’s first Sample and Return from the other celestial object than Earth, Itokawa a near Earth asteroid, orbiting around the Sun.
The human has now opened the door to the other world and we have plunged into the another Age of Discovery in solar system scale. Human will exploit the new voyage routes to the planets and asteroids, and try to utilize resources in the solar system. There will appear a new space infra-structure, the Deep Space Port constructed at the Sun-Earth Lagrange points, L1 or L2. It will serve as a traffic relay port function connecting the commuter transports from the ground with round trip voyager ships propelled by nuclear power to asteroids belts for potential mines. It also serves as a dwelling facility including refining works, docks and yards with laboratories. The Deep Space Port is a kind of city on orbit.
How such future age happens and what technology enables them will be presented referring to the Hayabusa mission that the speaker was in charge of from the beginning. The talk will also emphasize the significance of the space exploration that has ushered the space development so far, and will convey the exploration spirit to the next generation, so that they can advance and extend the space development in future.

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• Speakers’ Profile:

Dr. Junichiro Kawaguchi graduated from Mechanical Engineering of Kyoto University in 1978, and completed the Aerospace Engineering, Post Graduate School of Tokyo University in 1983, when he received the Doctor of Engineering from it. He was at Assistant Professor, the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) until 1988 since then, when he joined the institute. He got the Full Professor position in 2000. He participated in a variety of projects including Japan’s first planetary probes to comet Halley, Lunar Orbiter missions Hiten and GEOTAIL, Nozomi, a Mars mission, and Hayabusa, a world’s first sample and return mission from a solar body outside Earth gravity sphere. He had been the Project Manager of the Hayabusa mission since 1996 till 2011, during while the mission successfully touched down to the surface of a near Earth asteroid Itokawa and returned the sample back to the Earth in 2010 for the first time. He is also the founder of Ikaros, a world’s first Solar Sail demonstrator project launched in 2010. He is currently at Senior Fellow position, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).