Hayabusa
Hayabusa was a Japanese mission that brought back the first samples from an asteroid, Itokawa, in 2010.
Hayabusa, Japanese for peregrine falcon, was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in May 2003. In 2005 it reached the small near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa, a rubble pile about 535 metres long, and attempted to collect surface material in two brief touchdowns.
The mission suffered many problems, including failed reaction wheels, a fuel leak, a loss of contact and failing ion engines. Engineers nursed it home, and the sample capsule landed in the Australian outback on 13 June 2010, while the spacecraft itself burned up in the atmosphere.
Although the sampler had not fired as planned, the capsule contained about 1,500 tiny grains, most less than 0.1 millimetre across. Their analysis showed Itokawa is made of material matching LL ordinary chondrites that had been heated to petrologic types 4 to 6. This was the first direct proof that the commonest meteorites come from S-type asteroids.
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