The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa mission, launched in 2003, returned to earth in June, 2010 with the first samples from an extraterrestrial body since the Apollo missions. The most immediate impact of these samples was to confirm that the Hayabusa's samples of Asteroid Itokawa were similar in composition to LL Chondrites, a common stony meteorite found on earth, validating the more than 40,000 meteorite finds on earth as being representative samples of objects in space. The NASA Deep Impact mission provided a different body of information for Comet Tempel-1 that included close up photography and spectroscopic analysis of a plume created by a designed impact into Comet Tempel-1. The NASA Dawn mission, launched in 2007, is now returning exceptional high resolution imagery of asteroid Vesta from the Main Asteroid Belt, and will proceed to the minor planet Ceres, arriving July, 2015.
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-