* Astronomy

Hayabusa update: Capsule retrieved, heat shield found

The major news on the Hayabusa mission this morning is that JAXA has retrieved the sample capsule!  Here are some photos of the retrieval!
Read more

Some feared that the capsule's parachute would not deploy. When Hayabusa awkwardly landed on Itokawa to collect samples in November 2005, the controls to deploy a parachute could have been destroyed. A second concern was that a beacon antenna needed to find the capsule in the Australian outback wouldn't work.
Yoshiyuki Hasegawa of JAXA announced earlier today that the parachute had deployed as hoped and the capsule had had a soft landing.
Read more

According to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) the return capsule is being transported to the JAXA Sagamihara Campus in
Kanagawa, Japan, where the sample container will be inspected, and its contents, if any, will be extracted for analysis.

Japanese news coverage is proudly touting the mission as a "crystallisation" of Japan's space program that puts it, at least in certain areas of space science and technology, at the forefront. The trip to the Itokawa asteroid, a distance of 300 million kilometres, was the first round trip to a planetary body beyond the Moon. Altogether Hayabusa travelled 6 billion kilometres. The mission pushed ion thruster engines further than they've been pushed before, too. Despite technical problems, the ion engines were able to guide the craft in its last round of orbital corrections before coming back to Earth.
Read more