TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's space agency said
Wednesday its spacecraft had successfully touched down on an asteroid 180
million miles from Earth despite an earlier announcement that it had failed.
On Sunday,
JAXA officials had said the Hayabusa probe, on a mission to land on the
asteroid named Itokawa, collect material, then bring it back to Earth, failed
to touch down after maneuvering within yards of the surface.
However,
the agency said Wednesday that data confirmed that Hayabusa had landed on the
surface Sunday for a half-hour, although it failed to collect material.
JAXA
officials had said earlier that Hayabusa dropped a small object as a touchdown
target from 130 feet above the asteroid and then descended to 56 feet from the
surface, at which point ground control lost contact with the probe for about
three hours.
But after
analyzing data, the agency said the probe landed on the asteroid within about
99 feet of the initial landing target.
The agency
officials were still analyzing the data and will decide by Thursday whether to
conduct a second landing attempt Friday, according to Seiji Koyama, a spokesman
for the space agency.
The mission
has been troubled by a series of glitches.
A landing rehearsal
earlier this month was aborted when the probe had trouble finding a site, and a
small robotic lander that deployed from the probe was lost. Hayabusa also
suffered a problem with one of its three gyroscopes, but it has since been
repaired.
Hayabusa
was launched in May 2003 and has until early December before it must leave
orbit and begin its long journey home. It is expected to return to Earth and
land in the Australian Outback in June 2007.
The
asteroid is named after Hideo Itokawa, the father of rocket science in Japan, and is orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. It is 2,300 feet long and 1,000 feet
wide.
Examining
asteroid samples is expected to help unlock secrets of how celestial bodies
were formed because their surfaces are believed to have remained relatively
unchanged over the eons, unlike those of larger bodies such the planets or
moons, JAXA said.
A NASA
probe collected data for two weeks from the Manhattan-sized asteroid Eros in
2001, but did not return with samples.
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