Hayabusa
JAXA's Hayabusa, the first mission to bring back a piece of an asteroid: dust from Itokawa, collected in 2005 and returned to Earth in 2010.
Hayabusa, Japan's first asteroid explorer, was the first mission to collect material from an asteroid and bring it back to Earth.[1] Its target was Itokawa, a small rubble-pile asteroid whose longest dimension is only about 0.5 km.[1]
The journey
Hayabusa launched on 9 May 2003 and swung past Earth in May 2004 to pick up speed.[2] It arrived at Itokawa on 12 September 2005, after a journey of two billion km, and observed the asteroid from altitudes of 3 to 20 km.[2] It touched down twice, on 20 and 25 November 2005.[2] The device built to fire a projectile into the surface failed, but a small amount of dust still made it into the sample catcher.[1]
The return
The spacecraft changed its orbit for the journey home in April 2007 and its capsule landed on 13 June 2010, where it was recovered at Woomera, in Australia.[2]
What the dust showed
The grains matched the most common kind of meteorite found on Earth, which settled where those meteorites come from.[1] Many had cooled slowly after reaching about 800 °C deep inside a parent body thought to be more than ten times larger than Itokawa, so Itokawa is reassembled debris from a far bigger asteroid shattered by a collision.[2] Its successor, Hayabusa2, went on to bring back samples from Ryugu.[2]
Milestones
- May 9, 2003Launch on an M-V rocket from Uchinoura
- May 2004Earth swing-by
- September 12, 2005Arrives at asteroid Itokawa
- November 20, 2005First touchdown on Itokawa
- November 25, 2005Second touchdown on Itokawa
- April 2007Leaves Itokawa for Earth
- June 13, 2010Returns the Itokawa sample to Earth, the first asteroid sample
Sources
- [1]NASA, 25143 Itokawa — science.nasa.gov, retrieved November 4, 2026
- [2]JAXA Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center, Hayabusa and Itokawa — curation.isas.jaxa.jp, retrieved November 4, 2026
Related
- ItokawaThe small rubble-pile asteroid from which Japan's Hayabusa returned the first asteroid sample in 2010, linking common meteorites to their source.
- Hayabusa2JAXA mission that returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, then flew past Torifune in 2026; its extended mission targets 1998 KY26 in 2031.
- NEAR ShoemakerNASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and the first to land on one: a year at Eros, 2000 to 2001.
- Why missions visit asteroids and cometsWhat flybys, orbiters, landers, sample returns and impactors each learn about small bodies, and why that matters for science and for planetary defense.