JAXA Space probe Hayabusa heads home

Japan is counting down to the homecoming of a space hero next week: not an astronaut but a battered machine limping back from a seven-year odyssey to a distant space rock.

It is hoped the small probe Hayabusa ("Falcon") may have beaten bigger US and European projects to become the first spacecraft to bring home raw material from an asteroid, part of the primeval rubble left over from the making of the solar system.

Hayabusa, which cost 12.7 billion yen (138 million dollars) to develop, is approaching the end of a five-billion-kilometre (three-billion-mile) trek with broken engines, failed posture-adjusting devices and disfunctional batteries.

The spacecraft is due to release a canister expected to contain asteroid dust as it approaches Earth, aiming to land it at the Woomera Test Range in the Australian outback on June 13 -- if all goes well.

Hayabusa itself will be incinerated as it smashes into the atmosphere, prompting devout fans to declare that the falcon will be reborn as a "Phoenix" -- a mythical firebird.

The journey has captured the public imagination, with a computer-graphics movie "Hayabusa back to the Earth" drawing some 150,000 people at planetariums across the nation and proposals that the spacecraft be given a National Honour Award.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), on a special website (http://hayabusa.jaxa.jp/), has received nearly 1,000 messages treating the probe as a human boy and cheering him on in the lonely, difficult journey.

"What's special to Hayabusa is it has enthusiastic fans. I believe ordinary people love it because it tried what is unprecedented," JAXA associate professor Makoto Yoshikawa, told AFP.

The car-size probe with solar paddles has already become the world's first spacecraft to land on and lift off a celestial body other than the moon after it made a rendezvous with the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa.