Itokawa
A little pile of space rocks
Itokawa is a small asteroid with a strange stretched-out shape. It looks like a potato, or two rocks pressed together. It is only a few hundred metres long: tiny beside a planet! Big boulders cover its surface, with smoother patches of little stones between them. It has no atmosphere like the air around Earth.
Scientists discovered that Itokawa is like a pile of rubble held together by weak gravity. Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft visited, collected tiny particles, and brought them to Earth. Researchers examined these grains with special instruments. Even a little speck can tell us about the materials that built our Solar System’s worlds.
Play space games → Explore in the planetarium →In the planetarium you can spin this world and look at it from every side.
Artist’s impression · the surface is an illustration.
Sources and images
Celestial maps: Solar System Scope / INOVE · CC BY 4.0. Thumbnails were reduced and shaded. Artistic SVG maps were created for this project.