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 TOKYO (AP) - Japan's space agency has lost contact with a wayward probe that botched an attempted rehearsal landing in a mission to collect surface samples from an asteroid and return to Earth, an official said Monday.
The coffee can-sized Minerva robotic lander has been drifting above the asteroid since Saturday, when it was deployed from the mother probe Hayabusa, which is scheduled to attempt its own landings later this month.
Mission controllers can no longer contact Minerva or control its movements, and are hoping the solar wind will guide the probe back to the potato-shaped asteroid Itokawa for a possible soft landing, space agency spokesman Kiyotaka Yashiro said.
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