The Falcon has landed!

An international team of scientists verified the soft landing in the Australian outback of the return capsule from the space probe Hayabusa (Falcon) carrying the first samples ever taken directly from an asteroid. The probe landed twice on the half-kilometer-long asteroid Itokawa in 2005. It is not a certainty that the sample collector actually holds pieces of the surface, but project scientists are hopeful, and it's a brilliant feat of space exploration no matter how much or how little of Itokawa made it on board.