Particles from the asteroid Itokawa – each less than one-tenth of a millimetre across – brought back to Earth by the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft. For the first time, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) can study material from an asteroid that was not contaminated upon atmospheric re-entry. Credit: DLR (CC-BY 3.0)