This is something which has received painfully and surprisingly little news coverage both inside and outside of Japan...
Hayabusa has finally completed it`s mission and returned to Earth. Now all that is left is to check and see if it succeeded in collecting a sample or not. But after all it`s been through, even if there is no sample - no one will hold it at fault.
The story of this little machine quite honestly brought me to tears... (For some reason, stories of machines somehow just managing to scrape by in an almost dead state in an attempt to "survive" is a serious weak spot for me.) Pretty much everything that could go wrong DID go wrong, so Hayabusa sort of scraped by doing it`s best with severely limited (and leaking at that) fuel, resources, countless broken pieces and a number of malfunctioning systems.... And managed to make it home. It`s a testament to just how far the engineers thought ahead about potential failures and how much they invested into "self repairing" mechanisms.