With a friendly Aloha! Peter Jenniskens welcomed the members of the Hayabusa re-entry MAC to Hawaii as the DC8 landed at the military airport in the early morning of June 9th. The flight before was very exciting. Three out of four camera's were recording correctly and we were able to spot Venus! To be able to do this the flight crew had to guide the airplane on a course away from Hawaii because Venus was rising on the wrong side of the airplane. There was a 5 minute time window to observe and record Venus, a really exciting moment! It was hard to track the bright spot in the sky as the airplane made a bank to get back on its track to Hawaii. The reason for that is the large amount of cables connected to the cameras. We will have to come up with a better method of managing those cables. The restriction of only being able to record three cameras, which all produce an enormous amount of data, seemed to be a bandwidth problem. Right after landing we were escorted off the military base to head towards the Hotel. A part of the data is already copied to an external disk. This data will be used for further tuning later this week.
