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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Hayabusa touchdown successful!

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I wasn't able to watch so I thank Kazuya Yoshida very much for sending me the following news:

Hayabusa successfully touched down on the surface and ejected the sampling pellet at 7:07 am, Nov. 29th JST. All the sequence has been done normally, and the spacecraft is now ascending from Itokawa keeping attitude stabilized. An amazing thing is that the target marker with 880,000 names deployed last time was visible from a certain height during the sequence, therefore another target marker was not released today. It means that the 880,000 names on Itokawa lead Hayabusa today's successful touchdown.