Itokawa

25143 Itokawa (provisional designation 1998 SF36) is a sub-kilometer near-Earth object of the Apollo group and also a potentially hazardous asteroid. It was discovered by the LINEAR program in 1998 and later named after Japanese rocket engineer Hideo Itokawa. The peanut-shaped S-type asteroid has a rotation period of 12.1 hours and measures approximately 330 meters (1,100 feet) in diameter. Due to its low density and high porosity, Itokawa is considered to be a rubble pile, consisting of numerous boulders of different sizes rather than of a single solid body. It was the first asteroid to be the target of a sample-return mission, of the Japanese space probe Hayabusa, which collected more than 1500 regolith dust particles from the asteroid's surface in 2005. Since its return to Earth in 2010, the mineralogy, petrography, chemistry, and isotope ratios of these particles have been studied in detail, providing insights into the evolution of the Solar System. Itokawa was the smallest asteroid to be photographed and visited by a spacecraft prior to the DART mission to Dimorphos in 2022.