Return ticket to asteroid Itokawa: a Japanese spacecraft is attempting a mission that no other spacecraft has attempted before. Kawaguchi Jun'ichiro of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science describes the background to a voyage that in returning samples of a primitive body to Earth will help scientists understand the solar system's past

JAPAN launched its first unmanned satellite, the Ohsumi, in 1970. Fifteen years later, the country's first planetary exploratory spacecrafts, Sakigake and Suisei, were launched to study Halley's Comet, the rendezvous […]