Big Questions for Hayabusa
The Hayabusa (formerly Muses-C) mission is to collect a surface sample of material from the small asteroid and return the sample to Earth for analysis.
- How did the sun's family of planets and minor bodies originate?
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For the first time in human history we know of planets around other stars and many of those other planetary systems look quite different from our own. Many have a planet like Jupiter, or even bigger, nearest to the Sun. If we are to understand why this is the case, and how likely it is that there are Earth-like planets elsewhere, we need to better understand how planets form.