Makoto Yoshikawa (born February 6 1962) is a Japanese scientist, most notable for being project manager and later mission manager of

Hayabusa2 is an asteroid sample-return mission operated by the Japanese state space agency JAXA. It is a successor to the ''Hayabusa'' mission, which returned asteroid samples for the first time in June 2010. ''Hayabusa2'' was launched on 3 December 2 ...

, an asteroid

sample-return mission A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules or a deposit of complex compounds such as lo ...

operated by the Japanese space agency,

JAXA The is the Japanese national air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into orb ...

, and in 2018 was recognized in

Nature's 10 ''Nature'' 10 is an annual listicle of ten "people who mattered" in science, produced by the scientific journal ''Nature''. Nominees have made a significant impact in science either for good or for bad. Reporters and editorial staff at ''Nature'' ...

, a list of "people who mattered" in science by the journal Nature. His research specializes in celestial mechanics, particularly in orbital analysis of small Solar System bodies such as asteroids and comets.

Career and research

After his doctorate, he worked as a researcher at the Japan Society for the Protection of Science and then from 1991 was senior researcher at the then Communications Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. He joined the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in 1998, which since 2003 has been part of the

. As part of the orbital determination group at ISAS, he was involved with the Hayabusa and

Akatsuki may refer to: * Akatsuki (spacecraft), an uncrewed Venus orbiter * , any of three classes of destroyers of the Imperial Japanese Navy * , any of three destroyers of the Imperial Japanese Navy * ''Akatsuki'' (train), operated between Kyoto and Na ...

missions.

References

1962 births Living people People from Tochigi Prefecture 21st-century Japanese astronomers {{Scientist-stub