By Vienna Ma CANBERRA, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have been anxiously waiting for the asteroid-chasing Japanese space probe to make its delayed return to Earth, touching down on South Australia's outback on Sunday night, Australia's media reported on Friday. The battered Hayabusa probe will complete a journey that has lasted seven years and five billion kilometers about 2330 CST Sunday, breaking up and incinerating as it re-enters the atmosphere. Scientists will wait to see whether Hayabusa, which was three years behind schedule and hit by technical problems, has managed to gather fragments from a moving asteroid for vital clues about the universe. 'Hayabusa will be the first space mission to have made physical contact with an asteroid and returned to Earth,' National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Hayabusa project manager Tommy Thompson told the Australian Associated Press (AAP). 'This round-trip journey is a significant space achievement.' Hayabusa, which means peregrine falcon in Japanese, has blasted into space in May 2003 bound for Itokawa, a potato-shaped asteroid 300 million kilometers from Earth, to collect dust samples believed to yield unprecedented information about the evolution of the solar system. According to the AAP, Hayabusa will be the first spacecraft landing in Australia. 'So it's a very historic moment from that perspective but it's also very historic from the perspective that it's the first time that anybody's ever managed to actually bring a sample back from a distant asteroid, so the scientific world is pretty abuzz about the whole thing,' Lindsay Campbell from Australia's Woomera Test Range told ABC News. NASA scientist Michael Zolensky said the dust sample, if any, would be small, but significant for being able to reduce the threat of an asteroid impact. 'If you want to mitigate that hazard you have to know about the physical properties of asteroids, what they are made of, so they are important for that reason as well,' Dr. Zolensky told Times Online this week before heading out to the Woomera site. 'It probably is going to return less than a gram of sample, at the most a couple of grams, possibly much less than that.' But Japan's space agency Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ( JAXA) is uncertain what, if anything, the 40cm by 20cm sample pod will contain. Astronomers hope space dust from Itokawa will provide insights into the development of the solar system and information which could help minimize potential asteroid impacts with Earth. 'Even if the sampler did not work ... as it was planned to do, there is good reason to expect that just the process of landing on the asteroid would have coated the inside of the spacecraft with dust,' Dr. Zolensky said. 'When we open it up, I think it is not going to be empty.' A team of international astronomers will watch from a NASA jet above Australia, at a height of 12,000 meters as the 18kg canister re-enters at 1.93km per second. Once the dust pod is 10km above the ground, it will shed its heat shield and deploy a parachute and homing beacon to signal its exact landing location in the Woomera rocket testing range in South Australia's north. The capsule will be retrieved by helicopter, for air freighting by jet to ground control at Sagamihara, west of Tokyo. There it will be x-rayed, analyzed and finally opened by scientists from Japan, Australia and the United States. Thousands of supporters have left messages on the mission's website, with many referring to the probe as if it was a human boy and cheering him on the final approach back to Earth. 'What's special to Hayabusa is it has enthusiastic fans,' JAXA associate professor Makoto Yoshikawa told the Agence France- Presse (AFP). 'I believe ordinary people love it because it tried what is unprecedented.' 