Sakigake
Sakigake (MS-T5)
Mission Descriptions
Sakigake (MS-T5) is one of the planetary missions by JAXA and was designed to explore Halley's Comet. It was an engineering test satellite and was launched in 1985. The aims of the missions were verification of the launcher, sending a satellite to the interplanetary orbit, which had never been achieved by Japan at that time, evaluating and determining the orbit parameters around the sun necessary for interplanetary flights, communication in a great distance, determining and controlling the attitude, and so on. Furthermore, on March 11, 1986, as a member of the Halley Armada, an internationally cooperative spacecraft group, we approached Halley's Comet to a distance of 6.99 million km and observed the solar wind magnetic field and plasma near the comet. In 1987, a Japanese spacecraft performed the first Earth swing-by and changed its orbit, and the Earth swing-by (closest distance 80,000 km) was carried out from January 7 to January 9, 1992. For the first time, a Japanese spacecraft conducted a cross-sectional observation of the magnetosphere, penetrating from the tail to the head of the Earth's magnetosphere.
Refereneces
Mission overview paper
Instrument paper
- Oya, H. et al. (1986) Nature - Discovery of cometary kilometric radiations and plasma waves at comet Halley
- Saito, T. et al. (1986) Nature - Interaction between comet Halley and the interplanetary magnetic field observed by Sakigake
- Oyama, K. et al. (1986) Nature - Was the solar wind decelerated by comet Halley?
- Yumoto, K. et al. (1986) Bulletin of ISAS - Ring-Core Fluxgate Magnetometer Installed on Sakigake
- Nakagawa, T. et al. (1997) Bulletin of ISAS - Evaluation of offset components in SAKIGAKE magnetic field data