Dec. 29 – The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa spacecraft has brought home to Earth tiny pieces of an alien world – asteroid Itokawa. “It’s an incredible feeling to have another world right in the palm of your hand,” says Mike Zolensky, Associate Curator for Interplanetary Dust at the Johnson Space Center, and one of the three non-Japanese members of the science team.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/30dec_samplereturn/
