Orbiting around Itokawa (1)

Hayabusa arrived at its exploration target, near Earth asteroid Itokawa, on Sept., 12th, 2005 after having been propelled there via ion engines and an Earth swing-by. Since then, it has successfully performed orbital maneuvers, precisely keeping its position relative to Itokawa. The Hayabusa Project Team has made many discoveries while carrying out their ambitious scientific observations of Itokawa. This release summarizes and reports the major scientific and engineering achievements in advance of Hayabusa’s unprecedented and historic descent to the surfaceof Itokawa for sample collection middle to later this month (November 2005).