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Asteroid sampling mission probably failed 16:01 07 December 2005 NewScientist.com news service Maggie McKee and AFP The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa is likely to have failed in its landmark mission to collect the first-ever samples from an asteroid, mission officials said on Wednesday. It also faces trouble returning to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had earlier said the Hayabusa probe "most probably" succeeded in gathering material from the Itokawa asteroid, 290 million kilometres from Earth, on 26 November. The spacecraft was thought to have landed on the space rock for just one second, firing two metal pellets to throw...

Terror suspects very probably amateurs, say Italian police By Bruce Johnston in Rome (Filed: 02/08/2005) Italian police interrogating the suspected Shepherd's Bush July 21 bomber said yesterday he was "very probably" a member of a loose group of amateurs rather than an Islamist militant ring. Hussain Osman, 27, who was arrested in Rome on Friday, had no links to known terrorist cells, said the police official Carlo de Stefano at a press conference in the Italian capital. An armed police officer on patrol in Whitehall, central London, yesterday Investigations "lead us to believe as very probable that he belongs to...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Phoebe probably distant traveller Cassini's images of Phoebe Images of Saturn's moon Phoebe from the Cassini spacecraft suggest it may be a relic of objects that formed billions of years ago in the outer Solar System. The pictures seem to show ice in its craters, boosting the theory that it is more similar to comets and very distant Solar System objects than to asteroids. Scientists think Phoebe migrated inwards and was probably captured by Saturn's gravity billions of years ago. Several tiny Saturn moons may have been blasted out of Phoebe by space impacts. "Battered and beat-up as [Phoebe] is,...

<p>Make no mistake about it: The lawsuit filed by Gov. Gray Davis' allies against the attempt to recall the governor is meant to slow the process and ensure that the inevitable election is held later rather than sooner.</p> <p>The recall campaign has collected more than 1.7 million signatures, nearly twice the required minimum of 897,000. And the county officials who have begun to verify them are finding an unusually high rate of accuracy. The Californians who signed the petitions are who they say they are, in other words, and they are registered to vote. There will be an election.</p>