Hayabusa was the first spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.
Japan’s space agency JAXA launched Hayabusa in May 2003 to study the near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa. The spacecraft reached Itokawa in 2005 and attempted to collect surface material by firing a small projectile and capturing disturbed particles in a sampling mechanism.
Hayabusa suffered serious problems, including failures of reaction wheels, chemical thrusters, and a communications interruption. Despite these difficulties, mission controllers guided it back toward Earth. The return capsule landed in Australia on 13 June 2010, and analysis confirmed that it contained microscopic grains from Itokawa.
The mission returned only a tiny amount of material, but it demonstrated that robotic spacecraft could visit a small, irregular asteroid, operate near its surface, and deliver samples to Earth. Hayabusa2 later returned samples from asteroid Ryugu in 2020, while OSIRIS-REx returned samples from Bennu in 2023.