After a series of alternate successes and failures, the Hayabusa probe was claimed to have collected samples from the Itokawa asteroid. It was the first probe ever to collect samples from an asteroid. I did not go wrong with the tense when I...

It was on a mission to bring back the world’s first rock samples from an asteroid. Yes, it was, as the Japanese space probe failed to touch down on Sunday on its target nearly 300 million km (186 million miles) from earth. But, scientists...