25143 Itokawa

25143 Itokawa

25143 Itokawa is a tiny space rock that moves close to Earth. It was found in 1998 by the LINEAR program and named after Hideo Itokawa, a smart Japanese scientist who helped start rocket science in Japan.

Itokawa looks like a peanut and is about as long as three football fields put together! It spins around very fast—once every 12 hours. This space rock is made of many loose pieces of rock stuck together, like a pile of boulders.

The most exciting part about Itokawa is that a special spaceship called Hayabusa visited it. Hayabusa collected tiny dust pieces from Itokawa’s surface in 2005. The spaceship brought these pieces back to Earth in 2010. Scientists studied them and learned more about our Solar System.

Because of this visit, Itokawa became the first asteroid that a spacecraft brought pieces of back to our planet. It helped us understand how asteroids like Itokawa might have brought water and other things to Earth long ago.