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England - Rivals from the United States and Europe get the bigger headlines and bigger budgets, but a little-noticed Japanese mission to a distant space rock may scoop them all. Launched on May 9 2003, the little probe Hayabusa ("Falcon") is now on the brink of rendezvousing with a 630-metre asteroid on a mission that could prove historic. If all goes well, Hayabusa will be the first spacecraft to bring home raw material from an asteroid, part of the primeval rubble left over from the making of the Solar System. "It is an utterly remarkable project which has been given...

Smash-and-grab expected to be breakthrough 'Glitterball' with 877,490 names to be left behind Under the gentle puff of its ion drive, a Japanese space probe is positioning itself for an extraterrestrial first: a smash and grab on a speeding asteroid. The Hayabusa (or falcon) probe has been chasing the asteroid since 2003 and has this week reached within tens of miles of its surface.Scientists at the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science will spend the next few weeks using Hayabusa's cameras to build up a detailed map of the asteroid. The probe will close in on the asteroid...

Japanese asteroid sample-return spacecraft Hayabusa arrived Itokawa on 10:00 am, 12 Sep (JST: Japanese Standard Time). Now Hayabusa hovers around 20 kilometers away from asteroid Itokawa. Hayabusa will bring back samples from an asteroid and investigate the mysteries of the birth of the solar system. This picture was taken at 8:35 am, 12 Sep (JST) just before the settlement by the visible imager AMICA. Field of view is two degrees. The photo shows contrast of rocky and hilly region and smooth area, which may suggest the origin of this asteroid. This feature may be a key to consider Itokawa’s origin...

PARIS — Japan’s Hayabusa asteroid sample-return spacecraft has lost the use of a second reaction wheel, forcing increased reliance on its chemical-propellant thrusters for attitude control and raising questions about whether it can make its planned asteroid touchdown in November, Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) announced Oct. 4. Hayabusa, known as MUSES-C before its May 2003 launch, remains in a stable position 6.8 kilometers from its target, the Itokawa asteroid, now 305.9 million kilometers from Earth. Using two reaction control systems with the remaining reaction wheel, the probe is scheduled to continue scouting possible landing sites on...

23:39 2005-11-12 A landing craft from the Japanese space probe Hayabusa is expected to land on Itokawa as part of the first ever mission to land on an asteroid. The names of people from Liverpool are among about a million gathered globally which have been inscribed on an aluminium sheet on a landing robot. It is thought the names will lie on the asteroid for about one billion years. They were gathered by the Planetary Society of Japan as part of the mission, which aims to gather samples of space dust, reports BBC News. According to Space.com, taking some 12...

TOKYO (AP) -- A Japanese spacecraft showed signs of trouble Saturday after apparently landing on an asteroid and collecting surface samples in an unprecedented mission to bring the extraterrestrial material back to Earth, officials said. The Hayabusa probe, hovering about three miles from the asteroid, appeared to be shaking due to a possible gas leak from a thruster, said Atsushi Akoh, a spokesman for Japan's space agency, JAXA. JAXA will put Hayabusa into "safety mode" - which stabilizes the probe by turning its solar panels toward the sun - for two to three days to investigate, Akoh said. Communications between...

TOKYO - A Japanese spacecraft on an unprecedented mission to bring asteroid material back to Earth is set to start home despite showing signs of trouble earlier, an executive of Japan's space agency, JAXA, said Sunday. On Saturday, the Hayabusa probe apparently landed on the Itokawa asteroid and collected surface samples. After the landing, the probe hovered about three miles from the asteroid and appeared to be shaking due to a possible gas leak from a thruster, JAXA said. The probe shut down all its engines Saturday and switched to solar power while JAXA investigated the problem. But the probe...

A Japanese space probe which scientists hope will bring back a sample from an asteroid is due to return to Earth on schedule late on Sunday in the Australian outback, an Australian defense official said. The Hayabusa probe is due to land around 11.30 p.m. (1400 GMT) near the Woomera military range in the remote desert north of South Australia state. [snip] The return will mark the end of a seven-year journey that has taken the probe to the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa and back. It landed on the asteroid twice in 2005 and scientists hope it may have captured a...

Explanation: Where are the craters on asteroid Itokawa? Missing -- unexpectedly. The Japanese robot probe Hayabusa approached the Earth-crossing asteroid in 2005 and returned pictures showing a surface unlike any other Solar System body yet photographed -- a surface possibly devoid of craters. The leading hypothesis for the lack of common circular indentations is that asteroid Itokawa is a rubble pile -- a bunch of rocks and ice chunks only loosely held together by a small amount of gravity. If so, craters might not form so easily -- or be filled in whenever the asteroid gets jiggled by a passing...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)With NASA reporting a “potentially hazardous” asteroid nearly half-a-mile wide possibly heading toward earth, and some upstate New Yorkers claiming they experienced a loud boom and a bright light in the sky last night caused by a meteor, a doctors’ organization is offering some timely advice: Just as when the American populace first prepared for the possibility of a nuclear blast, a person’s best option for surviving a meteor strike is the same “duck and cover” created during the 1940s and ’50s when nuclear weaponry was still in its infancy. The warning comes from Physicians for Civil Defense, which issued...

Asteroid 2014 AW32 Orbit Diagram has several pieces that have different "closest Earth approach times and distances". The Virtual Telescope Project will offer a live, online event sharing real-time images of 2014 Aw32 with live commentary by our scientific staff, starting at 17:30 UT, which is 11:30 AM Central Standard Time today. But you must sign up for a free trial to watch it.

New Year's Eve didn't stop observer Richard Kowalski from scanning the sky for near-Earth objects (NEOs). Using the 60-inch telescope on Arizona's Mount Lemmon, he noticed a 19th-magnitude blip skimming through northern Orion in a seven-image series begun at 5:16 p.m. (1:16 Universal Time on January 1st). After confirming that it was a new find, Kowalski dutifully submitted positions and times to the IAU's Minor Planet Center. Thus did the Mount Lemmon reflector, part of the Catalina Sky Survey, discover 2014 AA, the first asteroid found this year. Impact possibilities for 2014 AA This plot shows the range of possible...

....The Geminids come from a small asteroid named 3200 Phaethon, which passes quite close to the sun. Its trail of dust and debris is what makes up the Geminids. Earth passes through this stream of debris every December. “Most meteor showers come from comets, which spew ample meteoroids for a night of ‘shooting stars.’ The Geminid meteor shower is different,” NASA writes in their Geminids site. “The parent is not a comet, but a weird rocky object named 3200 Phaethon that sheds very little dusty debris — not nearly enough to explain the Geminids.”.... “The Geminids are my favourite because...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a freakish asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust streaming from its body like spokes on a wheel, scientists said on Thursday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — This is one strange asteroid. The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a six-tailed asteroid in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Scientists say they've never seen anything like it. Incredibly, the comet-like tails change shape as the asteroid sheds dust. The streams have occurred over several months.

| The discovery of mysterious rocks on the brightest large asteroid in the solar system, Vesta, deepens the mystery surrounding the huge object's origins, researchers say. Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the solar system. The 330-mile-wide (530-kilometer) protoplanet is also the brightest large asteroid, with a surface about three times more luminous than Earth's moon.

WASHINGTON, October 16 (RIA Novosti) – US scientists are “itching” to work with their Russian counterparts in putting nuclear weapons technology to use in new systems to defend Earth from threatening asteroids, an investigative journalism outlet reported Wednesday. “In recent years, advocates of the use of nuclear weapons to counter space threats have been gaining ground,” the non-profit Center for Public Integrity (CPI) said in an article posted on its website. “NASA is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to study the idea, and the US nuclear weapons laboratories are itching to work with the Russians on it,”...

Full title: Could life on Earth end on March 16, 2880? Scientists predict giant asteroid will collide with our planet at 38,000 miles per hour Asteroid 1950 DA has a 0.3 per cent chance of hitting Earth in 867 yearsThis represents a risk 50% greater than an impact from all other asteroidsIf it were to hit, it would do so with an force of 44,800 megatonnes of TNT

60 Minutes news program ran a segment entitled "Dangerous game of 'cosmic roulette'?" This segment highlighted the NASA program aimed at finding and tracking asteroids whose orbits cross Earth's thus placing them on a collision course with us. The NASA administrators at first bragged about how they knew with confidence about 95% of all the "major" threats to our planet and were currently tracking these threats. These administrators were clearly trying to convey to the public an attitude of "don't worry, we have it all under control." Yet as with most statements by government bureaucrats the devil is in the...

Object: A 60-kilometre-wide asteroid Location: 3 billion kilometres ahead of Uranus, in the planet's L4 Lagrange point Uranus has a forbidden friend. The first asteroid to share the planet's orbit has been found, despite claims that Jupiter's mighty gravity should steal such companions away. The finding hints that more of these asteroids, called Trojans, lurk around unexpected worlds. Since Trojans don't always stay in place, finding new ones improves our picture of how space rocks migrate around the solar system. It also means there may be super-sized Trojans sharing orbits with massive exoplanets. Mike Alexandersen of the University of British...