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beamjockey: The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa has arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa. Over the next several months it's going to examine the asteroid from orbit for a while, then land on it and return a sample—the first sample return from an extraterrestrial body other than the Moon.
This will be the second landing on an asteroid after the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft landed on Eros in 2001. But NEAR wasn't designed as a lander, and all it sent back from the surface was a gamma-ray spectrum.
beamjockey: The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa has arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa. Over the next several months it's going to examine the asteroid from orbit for a while, then land on it and return a sample—the first sample return from an extraterrestrial body other than the Moon.This will be the second landing on an asteroid after the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft landed on Eros in 2001. But NEAR wasn't designed as a lander, and all it sent back from the surface was a gamma-ray spectrum.