Prepare for Impact...throw an asteroid on the barbie!

     Next summer an asteroid will come rocketing through the atmosphere heading straight for Australia! Ok not exactly, actually, it will be samples of an asteroid know as Itokawa inside a capsule that will be released from Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, as it burns up in the atmosphere.
    Hi, I’m Ashleigh, one of the research interns here at NOVA and I’ve been working on researching this story. Sadly, we can’t make the trip to Australia next June, but here are some of the details:
     In the summer of 2003 JAXA (the Japanese space program) sent Hayabusa to the asteroid to sample it, the first mission of its kind. Next June, Hayabusa (which means falcon in Japanese) will return to earth, falling, just like an asteroid. NASA and JAXA will be tracking the spacecraft using asteroid tracking software, though they anticipate that it will land in Australia.
     Once the capsule containing (hopefully) the asteroid samples has been collected, the samples will be analyzed in a lab in japan. The teams involved are the Hayabusa mission team from Japan, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. The story of the returning spacecraft was first reported by National Geographic Daily News.