You try coming home on time after traveling four billion miles.

Three years after its initially scheduled return date, Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft returned to Earth yesterday and dropped its collection canister in the Australian outback. The team from JAXA, Japan’s space agency, hopes that the container holds samples from Hayabusa’ 2005 landing on an asteroid called Itokawa. They won’t know for sure for a couple weeks, but Hayabusa has already made history by landing on an asteroid and returning to Earth.

(Check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post featuring video footage of Hayabusa’s return in which the probe breaks up into a spectacular flash.)

The headline on JAXA’s website currently reads, “Welcome back HAYABUSA to Earth after overcoming various difficulties!” That’s putting it mildly:

Hayabusa was originally due to return to Earth in 2007 but a series of technical glitches — including a deterioration of its ion engines, broken control wheels, and the malfunctioning of electricity-storing batteries — forced it to miss its window to maneuver into the Earth’s orbit until this year [AP].

And there are no guarantees the craft got any samples. When Hayabusa landed on the asteroid, it was supposed to fire a projectile into the surface. The idea was that this would kick up enough dust for the spacecraft to grab with its collector, but nobody knows whether or not that actually worked. If it didn’t, researchers say there’s still a good chance that Hayabusa brought home asteroid samples:

“It may have worked, it may not; we just don’t know,” said Dr Michael Zolensky from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “But even if it didn’t work, the spacecraft landed for half an hour on the surface, and during that landing — it was a hard landing — it should have collected a sample even without firing anything. So, we’re pretty confident there’ll be something inside the spacecraft” [BBC News].

The sample container crashed down in an Australian military zone called the Woomera Prohibited Area, where helicopters spotted it after about an hour of looking. Japanese, Australian, and American scientists are preparing the container for its trip to Tokyo. Fingers crossed for the little spacecraft that could: If it did return asteroid dust, it would be the first to do so. (NASA’s Stardust mission has brought comet samples home before, and of course the Apollo Astronauts returned with moon rocks.)

Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: Video of Hayabusa’s Return
80beats: Today in Space: S. Korean Rocket Blows Up, Japan Craft Spreads a Solar Sail
80beats: Japan’s Damaged Asteroid Probe Could Limp Back to Earth in June

Image: JAXA

After the scale of the BP oil spill in the Gulf became evident, Photographer Nathaniel Welch went to Venice, Louisiana, to see what had become of his favorite fishing grounds. He used artificial light to capture these objects as he found them on the beach. Welch: “Ryan Lambert of Cajun Fishing Adventures took me out on his boat to some outer islands near Grande Isle, LA, where the majority of oil was starting to come ashore. As we got close to the island on the backside, we started to see an oil slick in the bay, not thick black oil, just a sheen on the water, too subtle to photograph, but you could smell it. We pulled up on the back of the island, got out, and walked out onto the beach on the front of the island. Big gooey tar balls were on the beach and also coating everything from old beer cans to marsh vegetation. There was an eerie absence of wildlife.

I’ve been going down to Venice, Louisiana for years to fish. I’ve fished offshore for the pelagics like tuna and marlin, and I’ve fished inshore in the marshes for coastal species like trout and redfish. It’s an understatement to say the fishing is exceptional. It is ironic that when fishing offshore there, the oil rigs are the fishing destination and that’s where we would set up. The fish congregate underneath and around the rigs, as the small bait fish use it for protection.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that there are 35 National Wildlife Refuges that line the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida that are currently at risk from the BP oil spill. These refuges are home to dozens of threatened and endangered species, including West Indian manatees, whooping cranes, Mississippi sandhill cranes, wood storks, and four species of sea turtles. “This spill is significant, and in all likelihood will affect fish and wildlife resources in the Gulf—and across the North American Continent—for years, if not decades, to come,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Acting Director Rowan Gould in a recent teleconference.

All images Nathaniel Welch/Redux Pictures

Oil coated aluminum can, Louisiana, 6/5/10

What does a sunset look like when you’re racing through space at 8000 meters per second?

This:

Oh, I could go on and on about the curvature of the Earth, the layers of the atmosphere, the distribution of colors, how the aerosol layer is thin and glows after sunset, and what it must be like to go through 16 sunrises and sunsets every day. But you can get all that information from the NASA website. And really, the enduring nature of this picture is not what it shows, but that it was taken by a human being in space.

This week at the Intersection, in addition to our regular postings we're also going to carry a series of guest posts from Science in the News (SITN), a group of Harvard Ph.D. students whose communication attempts we greatly admire. This is the first post, and merely intended to let SITN introduce itself. One hope is that by featuring the group here, we will inspire the growth of similar organizations at other campuses. So, here they go: Science in the News (SITN) is an organization of PhD students at Harvard University, and our mission is to bring the newest and most relevant science to a general audience. At SITN, we strive to share our enthusiasm for science without over-hyping the promise of new discoveries, and to wade through the technical jargon to make science more accessible. For over a decade, we've been presenting a fall lecture series at Harvard Medical School. The lectures focus on a diversity of current and newsworthy topics, such as stem cell biology and climate change. We also publish a regular online newsletter, the SITN Flash. The Flash is written by graduate students at Harvard and focuses on current scientific discoveries and emerging fields. SITN also hosts “Science by the Pint” in ...