The re-entry of the Hayabusa capsule – on the right hand side is sample return canister, and on the left is the spacecraft as it breaks up.
Credit: NASA
SYDNEY: Scientists in Australia's vast Outback have recovered a capsule containing the first piece of asteroid ever brought to Earth - perhaps offering a glimpse into ancient space history.
The pod was ejected from a Japanese space probe as the host vessel burned up in a spectacular display over Australia following a seven-year odyssey across the Solar System to the Itokawa asteroid.
Itokawa is a 500-metre-long, metal- and silicate-rich asteroid, which travels between Earth and Mars on an elliptical orbit. Its orbital period is 1.5 years, but the orbit is chaotic: beyond 200 years, we cannot predict where it will end up, but it will likely smash into an inner planet or the Sun, according to JAXA.
Textbook landing in Woomera
It lay in the desert dust overnight before scientists were given the go-ahead to retrieve it after Aboriginal elders deemed it had not landed in any indigenous sacred sites. "The capsule is deemed intact at the moment," the Japanese space agency JAXA said in a statement.
The heat-resistant capsule parachuted into South Australia's remote Woomera military zone after being released from the Hayabusa spacecraft, which flamed back into the planet's atmosphere late Sunday.
The director of the Woomera test range, Doug Gerrie, said the probe had completed a textbook landing in the South Australian desert and had avoided any sensitive sites. "They (JAXA) landed it exactly where they nominated they would," he said.
Textbook landing
The historic mission means that for the first time a spacecraft has made contact with an asteroid and returned to Earth. The Hayabusa probe, which was launched in 2003, has endured a series of technical mishaps over its five-billion-kilometre (three-billion-mile) journey to the ancient Itokawa asteroid.
The Hayabusa probe landed on Itokawa in 2005, finding evidence for space weathering and vibrations that have altered its surface.
Fears for the return journey kept watching scientists anxious and Yoshiyuki Hasegawa, JAXA's associate executive director, said when they knew the capsule had made a better-than-expected soft landing, "we were very happy".
