Small Bodies Mission Support

Sakigake (MS-T5) was a test spacecraft designed by Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) to encounter comet 1P/Halley. Its launch was a test to confirm the performance of the newly developed ISAS launch system before the system was used to launch the Suisei spacecraft on 18 August 1985.

Sakigake (MS-T5) was launched from Kagoshima Space Center on 8 January 1985. The spacecraft carried three instruments to measure wave spectra, solar wind ions, and interplanetary magnetic fields. Sakigake flew by comet 1P/Halley at a distance of about 7 million kilometers on 11 March 1986.

Telemetry contact was lost with Sakigake on 15 November 1995. Future missions of the spacecraft had included a flyby of comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova on 3 February 1996, and a flyby of comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner on 29 November 1998.

The Sakigake Mission Description is available from the National Space Science Data Center database.

The SBN is the PDS node leading the efforts to restore and archive the data from the small body missions such as the Sakigake mission.

Instrument/Investigation	Measuring	Small Bodies Data available below
Plasma Wave Probe (PWP)	Plasma wave spactra of the cometary object over a frequency range of 70 Hz-200 kHz	none
Solar Wind Experiment (SOW)	Bulk velocity, density and temperature of solar-wind ions	1P/Halley
Magnetometer (IMF)	Magnetic field components within several million kilometers of the cometary object	1P/Halley

Instrument/ Investigation Description	Target	Description of Available Data	Data Link
IMF	1P/Halley	International Halley Watch data	CDROM
SOW	1P/Halley	International Halley Watch data	CDROM

Target	Target Type	Other Data Sets Targeting this Object
1P/Halley	Comet	International Halley Watch CDROM archive