IF JAPANESE space officials never hear from Hayabusa again, they’ll probably be relieved after all the grief it has given them in the last few weeks. Following the euphoria when the probe finally landed on the asteroid on 26 November, it now seems that the spacecraft did not collect the asteroid samples after all.
“We found that the possibility is very high that a metal bullet to collect samples was not actually fired,” an official for the Japanese Space Agency JAXA said. “And therefore the possibility is also very high that Hayabusa has failed to collect samples.”
Just after the…
