TOKYO: Samples of dust collected by a Japanese space probe from an asteroid about 300 million km from Earth were better than hoped for, with one researcher saying he was lost for words when they opened the capsule for the first time.

The samples, the climax of a six-year space odyssey to the Ryugu asteroid by the space probe Hayabusa2, arrived in Japan last week but researchers did not know for sure until this week if they had actually gotten anything.