Spacecraft Lands Successfully on Asteroid

08:58 PM EST November 23, 2005
Associated Press

TOKYO
Japan's space agency said Wednesday its spacecraft had successfully
touched down on an asteroid 180 million miles from Earth despite an
earlier announcement that it had failed.

On Sunday, JAXA officials had said the Hayabusa probe, on a mission to
land on the asteroid named Itokawa, collect material, then bring it
back to Earth, failed to touch down after maneuvering within yards of
the surface.

However, the agency said Wednesday that data confirmed that Hayabusa
had landed on the surface Sunday for a half-hour, although it failed
to collect material.

JAXA officials had said earlier that Hayabusa dropped a small object
as a touchdown target from 130 feet above the asteroid and then
descended to 56 feet from the surface, at which point ground control
lost contact with the probe for about three hours.

But after analyzing data, the agency said the probe landed on the
asteroid within about 99 feet of the initial landing target.

The agency officials were still analyzing the data and will decide by
Thursday whether to conduct a second landing attempt Friday, according
to Seiji Koyama, a spokesman for the space agency.

The mission has been troubled by a series of glitches.

A landing rehearsal earlier this month was aborted when the probe had
trouble finding a site, and a small robotic lander that deployed from
the probe was lost. Hayabusa also suffered a problem with one of its
three gyroscopes, but it has since been repaired.

Hayabusa was launched in May 2003 and has until early December before
it must leave orbit and begin its long journey home. It is expected to
return to Earth and land in the Australian Outback in June 2007.

The asteroid is named after Hideo Itokawa, the father of rocket
science in Japan, and is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. It
is 2,300 feet long and 1,000 feet wide.

Examining astero(AP) - id samples is expected to help unlock secrets
of how celestial bodies were formed because their surfaces are
believed to have remained relatively unchanged over the eons, unlike
those of larger bodies such the planets or moons, JAXA said.

A NASA probe collected data for two weeks from the Manhattan-sized
asteroid Eros in 2001, but did not return with samples.