BBCnews is carrying this update on the long-suffering Hayabusa space probe. After any number of glitches and failures, it's finally starting to return valuable data, and lots of it. First up, evidence that the Itokawa asteroid is probably very young, and may in fact be a "rubble pile"... less a solid body than a loose aggregation of boulders all flying in close formation. Sort of like my brother's Trans Am, but with rocks instead of bolts.

The data is expected to provide insight into just how we might want to go about stopping one of these things should it decide to do a chicken little on us.