Japanese probe to travel into Earth's past

A Japanese space probe blasted off yesterday on a six-year round trip to an asteroid.

It will bring back samples that scientists hope will help reveal the origins of life.

The launch of the Hayabusa 2, postponed twice because of bad weather, was less than a month after a pioneering European Space Agency probe landed on a comet.

"Hayabusa" means "peregrine falcon" in Japanese.

The probe will map the surface of the asteroid before touching down, deploying small explosives to blast out a crater and collecting the resulting debris.

Asteroids are believed to have formed at the dawn of the solar system. The probe's target is one called 1999 JU3, which scientists believe contains organic matter (carbon compounds) that may have contributed to life on Earth.

The probe is expected to arrive at the asteroid in mid-2018 and return with samples in 2020, the year Tokyo hosts the Summer Olympic Games.

The mission should help Japan's space programme put a troubled past well behind it.

The first Hayabusa probe was unable to collect as much material as hoped but still made history by being the first vessel to bring back samples from an asteroid.

Its seven-year mission ended in 2010 when it blazed a trail over Australia before slamming into a desert.

Both probes were developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The European Space Agency's Philae probe finished a 57-hour mission on the surface of a comet on November 15 but lost power because it landed in an area shielded from the sunlight it needed to charge its battery for an extended mission.

A US spaceship designed to fly astronauts beyond Earth's orbit for the first time since the 1960s-era Apollo moon programme is due to blast off today in a long-awaited debut test flight.

An unmanned version of an Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin for Nasa, will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, aboard a Delta4 heavy rocket.

Today's test run will be followed in four years by the launch of a second Orion capsule, also unmanned, on the debut flight of Nasa's under-development space launch system rocket. That flight will send the capsule around the moon.

Orion's third flight, scheduled for around 2021, is expected to carry astronauts.

Eventually Nasa intends to use Orion and the new rocket to send crews to Mars. Astronauts have not ventured beyond Earth's orbit since the 1969-1972 Apollo moon programme.