Last week JAXA had a huge success in safely landing its Hayabusa craft in Australia. But before we go in to that, lets back up and talk a bit about what Hayabusa is and how we got to this point.On May 9th, 2003 at 4:23 UTC the Japanese solid fueled rocket M-5 launched from the Uchinoura Space Center. Aboard was a little spacecraft designed to do something no other vehicle had done before. It would approach an asteroid, hover, take a sample and return the sample safely to Earth. Hayabusa would not land but rather touch the surface with its sample capturing device and then move away, so we're not to call it a lander.Four ion engines kept the petal to the metal for 2 years straight and in 2005 the craft rendezvoused with the asteroid Itokawa. That asteriod was actually not its initial target. Originally Hayabusa was supposed to land on the asteroid 4660 Nereus, but a faulty M-5 rocket forced a delay which pushed the asteroid out of our reach. But that's not where the trouble started or ended.Even prior to the launch there were some problems. The non-lander was to deploy a small rover designed by NASA and developed by JPL on to the surface of the asteroid, but was cancelled due to budget reasons. Minus 2 points US. Then in 2002 JAXA needed to re-check the O-rings of their rocket as it was found to be made of a different material than was specified, and thus the launch was pushed the launch back to 2003. Finally after it did take off the Hayabusa spacecraft got slammed with a ...