The Hayabusa space probe landed successfully on its asteroid target despite the initial announcement of a failure, Japan's space agency says.

But it apparently failed to drop equipment to collect material from the surface of asteroid Itokawa.

The Japanese spacecraft is on a mission to return these samples from Itokawa to Earth for the summer of 2007.

Controllers lost contact with the probe after it manoeuvred to within several metres of the space rock.

However, data confirmed Hayabusa landed on Itokawa on Sunday for half an hour, Japan's space agency (Jaxa) has said.

On Sunday, Jaxa spokesman Toshihisa Horiguchi told Associated Press: "Hayabusa reached extremely close, but could not make the landing."

He added that the reason for the failure was unknown.

However, the agency said in an update on Wednesday that the spacecraft in fact managed to touch down on the potato-shaped Itokawa asteroid located 290 million km (180 million miles) from Earth for about 30 minutes, the AFP news agency reported.

It was the first landing by a Japanese space vehicle on another Solar System object, the agency said.

Jaxa will decide on Thursday whether to make a second attempt to land Hayabusa, originally scheduled for Friday 25 November.

Although the body of the probe has not suffered any major damage, some of its sensors need to be checked, the agency said.