A Japanese spacecraft that touched down on a space rock during a billion-mile mission successfully returned the first ever samples from the surface of an asteroid, Japan's space agency said today (Nov. 16).
The samples are in the form of tiny dust grains collected directly from the asteroid Itokawa in 2005 by Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft, which returned to Earth in June. It was a 1.25 billion-mile (2 billion-kilometer) trip that took seven years to complete.
"About 1,500 grains were identified as rocky particles, and most of them were judged to be of extraterrestrial origin, and definitely from Asteroid Itokawa," the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said in a statement.
JAXA scientists have known there were particles of material in the Hayabusa sample return capsule since July. But they were unsure if those particles were actually pieces of an asteroid, cosmic dust or contamination from Earth. Now, they said, it is clear. The Hayabusa spacecraft collected samples of an asteroid.
With the mission's success, JAXA has already begun planning a follow-up mission – called Hayabusa 2 – which would send a $200 million spacecraft to visit a carbon-rich asteroid. That mission is slated to launch in 2014, arrive at the asteroid in 2018 and return samples to Earth by 2020, JAXA officials have said. Space.com
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