25143 Itokawa

asteroid · space rocks · near-Earth object · rubble pile

Peanut-shaped asteroid. Itokawa looks like a giant peanut in space and measures about 330 meters across, which is roughly the length of three football fields.

A rubble pile. Instead of being one solid rock, Itokawa is made of many boulders of different sizes all stuck together by gravity, kind of like a cosmic pile of gravel.

Named after an engineer. Scientists named this asteroid after Hideo Itokawa, a brilliant Japanese rocket engineer who helped develop Japan's space program.

Fast spinner. Itokawa rotates once every 12.1 hours, which means a day on this asteroid is shorter than a day on Earth.

Discovered in 1998. The LINEAR program, which uses telescopes to find asteroids, discovered Itokawa in 1998 and it's close enough to Earth to be considered potentially hazardous.