Japan's Hayabusa mission arrived at the asteroid in early September and has been imaging and maneuvering around the floating space mountain ever since.
One scientific goal of the Hayabusa mission is to determine out how much ice, rock and trace elements reside on the asteroid's surface, which should give indications about how asteroids and planets formed in the early Solar System.
A can-sized robot MINERVA that was scheduled to hop around the asteroid's surface has not, so far, functioned as hoped.
