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nednobbins t1_jdip9rk wrote

Why is this labeled as the first time a US mission returns an asteroid sample?

I looked around a bit and it looks like nobody has done that yet. Was there a previous one I couldn't find?

The headline kind of implies that someone else did it first but I can't find anything to support that.

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spacembracers t1_jdiqy9t wrote

Yeah I’m pretty sure Japan did a few years ago and landed it in australia

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DimorphosFragment t1_jdisyx6 wrote

Japan's JAXA has done it twice. (But the first project returned very little.)

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/hayabusa-2/in-depth/

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blipman17 t1_jdiv8hk wrote

What happened to the first project the? I can't find anything about it.

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DimorphosFragment t1_jdkmtrm wrote

The first Hayabusa spacecraft malfunctioned during the sample collection attempt. It did manage to return several tiny grains of dust from an asteroid despite the sample collection mechanism not operating. There is quite a bit of information about it at wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

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kuro24811 t1_jdl8pil wrote

Surprisingly it is the first for the US, but NASA has brought comet dust back with the Stardust Spacecraft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(spacecraft).

NEAR Shoemaker was a fun mission to read about also since it surprised people at NASA when they tried and successfully soft landed on the asteroid Eros at the end of the mission since it wasn’t designed to do that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAR_Shoemaker

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