12 Miles From an Asteroid

Bringing Japan’s most complex space mission near its climax, a probe is within 12 miles of an asteroid almost 180 million miles from Earth in an unprecedented rendezvous designed to retrieve rocks from its surface.

The Hayabusa probe, launched in May 2003, will hover around the asteroid before its brief encounter to recover the samples in early November. The asteroid is between Earth and Mars.

“The mission is going very smoothly and proceeding as planned,” Atsushi Wako, a spokesman for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Tuesday.

The asteroid, informally called Itokawa after the father of Japanese rocket science, is comparatively small -- 2,300 feet long and 1,000 feet wide.

The probe’s first mission is to survey the asteroid with cameras and infrared imaging gear. It has already begun sending back images, Wako said.

When Hayabusa moves in for the rendezvous, which will take seconds, it will pull close enough to fire a small bullet into the asteroid, collecting the ejected fragments in a funnel-like device. The probe won’t be coming back with much -- the amount of material planners hope to capture wouldn’t even fill a teaspoon.

JAXA officials said Hayabusa would be the first two-way trip to an asteroid. The probe is set to return to Earth in 2007, landing in the Australian outback.