A spacecraft launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2014 successfully touched down on a speeding near-Earth asteroid, and has collected samples to bring back for scientists to study. Everyone, we did it!!! #haya2_TD Thank you so much for your support from all over the world! pic.twitter.com/cHkeTCBgcs — HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 22, 2019 For the space aficionado in me, this is a goosebumps-raising achievement because the asteroid Ryugu is a tiny rock, floating in space about 300 million km (186 million miles) away from our planet. It took the Hayabusa2 spacecraft almost four years to reach the asteroid,…

This story continues at The Next Web