Japanese scientsts confirm space probe Hayabusa recovered asteroid dust

UK: Japanese scientsts confirm space probe Hayabusa recovered asteroid dust

Japanese scientists have confirmed that particles found inside the Hayabusa space probe are from the asteroid Itokawa, the first time that specimens from an asteroid have been recovered.

Hayabusa returned to Earth in June, its heat-proof pod crashing into the Australian outback after a seven-year journey, but scientists needed an extended analysis of the samples within the craft to make sure they were from Itokawa.

"This is a world first and it is a remarkable accomplishment that brought home material from a celestial body other than the moon," Yoshiaki Takagu, science and technology minister, told a press conference called to announce the scientists' findings.

The craft's achievement is all the more remarkable given the vast distances it travelled - Itokawa is 300 million km from Earth, twice the distance of our planet to the sun - and a series of equipment failures during the mission.



Ground control feared the 510-kg craft had been lost when it was out of contact for seven weeks, a fault that added three years to the flight, while it also suffered a malfunctioning gyroscope and a fuel leak.

Another glitch threatened to ruin the mission entirely when a mechanism to fire a pellet into the surface of the asteroid failed. A close examination of the chamber designed to capture the dust stirred up by the round revealed that it contained around 1,500 specimens of space dust - most a mere 1 micrometre in size.

Concerned that the specimens were contaminants from the Earth, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency conducted numerous tests on the dust and were able to identify silicon, oxygen and a number of metals in the particles. Using scanning electron microscopes, they were also able to confirm that around 1,500 of the specimens "are extra-terrestrial and come from Itokawa."

The Japanese scientists hope that their research will provide new information about the birth of the solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago.