Photos: Asteroid hunters leaving/returning to Earth
NASA plans to visit two of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt while a damaged Japanese probe is struggling to return asteroid samples back to Earth.
NASA is having troubles of its own trying to get its Dawn mission off the ground on July 7. The probe is scheduled to be the first spacecraft to orbit and study the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. NASA is having problems with an assembly crane. Plus, the launch vehicle has sustained damaged from weather and an errant tool. A launch postponement could cost up to $25 million as it would also delay the Mars Phoenix probe which is slated to liftoff in late August.
Here's the Dawn spacecraft with the asteroid Itokawa (inset) on which the Japanese space probe Hayabusa landed and took soil samples.
