Prof Junichiro Kawaguchi

He 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, when he became an Associate Professor. He got the Full Professor position at ISAS in 2000. He participated in a variety of space 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 Australia in 2010 historically, for the first time. He was at the official advisor position for the Hayabusa-2, a successor mission. He is also the founder of Ikaros, a world’s first Solar Sail demonstrator project launched in 2010. He is a professor emeritus, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Along with the JAXA agency activities, he had been a Professor in Aerospace Engineering course at the University of Tokyo and had been engaged in the education for post graduate students for almost 25 years. During while almost 100 students finished the master course and more than 20 students acquired the Ph.D. degrees. He was the president of Japan Society for Space and Astronautical Science. And he also served Secretary General at the Strategic Headquarters for Space Policy's, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan. He had been a Full Member and has been a corresponding member at the Science Council of Japan, Government of Japan. He has been a Fellow at the Japan Society for Space and Astronautical Science. He has been a Full Member, Board of Trustee at the International Academy of Astronautics.

Prof. Junichiro Kawaguchi has been engaged in aerospace engineering, especially narrowly in the astrodynamics,the applied flight dynamics associated with the spacecraft. Among a variety of the research fields in it, he hasmajored the orbital synthesis and optimization in multi-body dynamics, especially in the interplanetary flight. Healso majored the multi-rigid body mechanics and robotics as well.The research outcomes of him have provided not only the analytical desk-top investigation but also the real flightverification and demonstration. His discipline, different from the other research outcomes, states ‘Nothing thatdoes not appear in real never leads to the engineering.’ The biggest example was the world’s first sample andreturn mission, Hayabusa, from a celestial object, a near Earth asteroid, Itokawa in 2010. It was the integratedachievement, full of engineering and computer science on the guidance, navigation, control and flight dynamics.Those innovative achievements were also academically awarded a lot of times.

     Hayabusa Spacecraft

He is the founder of world's first solar sail spacecraft, Ikaros that launched in2010. The selfie image captured from a detached camera is shown below.

   IKAROS Solar Sail Spacecraft

One of the specialties of him is in astrodynamics, especially an orbital syntheis. He and his team devised a double-lunar energy raising transfer technique utilizing solar tidal force in combination of the moon's gravity assists, when Nozomi Mars orbiter spacecraft was launched in 1998.

  Nozomi Actual Flight using four bodies' gravity plus tidal force assist.

He devised Eccentricity to Inclination (E2I) conversion method to realize short-period solar polar explorer all ballistically. It is expected to play out-of-ecliptic helio-physics and astronomy missions.

 E2I to Short-period Solar Polar missions.

 His recent research includes an innovative range and clock synchronization scheme that acts via asynchronous bi-lateral communication in a pair of stations/spacecraft. It enables simultaneous clock synchronization and enables a flight traffic control for multiple cargo landers accessing to the southern polar region of the moon. It is serviced from a calibrator on board the lunar Gateway station.  

The research activities he has so far done is in 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11i6GsK5nMlpa8Yns0-GzApJHzW2W5CfJ/view?usp=sharing

He had served to the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency foralmost forty years. He, at the same time, had been at the professor position at the University of Tokyo. Theinstitute is the special governmental organization where the employee research staffs are requested to contributeto the research and education quite similarly to those at the universities. The institute had been a kind oflaboratory to him, while he had been a professor at the university. Since the research themes sometimesbelonged to the security area and also due to the promotion and funding mechanism, his academic publicationamount is relatively limited. Nevertheless, he published five book chapters and more than fifty peer-reviewedarticles in his career. The research activities are, since the missions were, with little exception, all international.Author ordering in the publication generally indicates relative contribution, with the first two and the last two placesgiven to authors who have contributed most. For almost last twenty years, his activity intentionally makes thestudents or the younger researchers he mentored should be listed as the first author. And as to the authorship, hisname appeared last in many cases.He has contributed to then journals in the aerospace engineering field. As to such specialized sharp filed, theimpact factor tends to become modest. But top ten highly ranked journals in the field included Progress inAerospace Sciences (8.7), Acta Astronautica (2.7), Advances in Space Research (2.2) and Journal of guidance,control, and dynamics (2.0), etc. and he had provided a lot of contributions to those journals. His researchoutcomes, in the field of the space science, extended to the contribution in the prominent science journal,‘Science’ which has the impact factor of 47.7.The publications of him have received significant attention not only from the aerospace engineering but from thewider science community. The scientific outcomes in the Hayabusa mission on ‘Science’ were cited more thanone thousand times and hundreds of citations were on the planetary science journals. For most of the journals,the name of Prof. Kawaguchi appeared at the end of the authors’ list, since his contribution did bring thoseresearch outcomes. His research outcomes in the astrodynamics, several papers he led and mentored were citedmore than fifty times, despite the small community size. His name appeared at the end of the authors’ list andmakes it clear that all those contributions were led and extracted by his expertise and mentorship.