Sections:


• Nascita e Finalità Istituzionali
• Fonti
• Le nuove frontiere di Lunar Explorer Italia
• Il sito Lun.Ex.It e il Materiale Contenuto
• Lun.Ex.It e gli UFO
• Differenze tra Lun.Ex.It. ed altre Associazioni
• The Moon Today


• True Planets
• People of Lunexit
• Right to Reply
• Utilities


• Contattaci




  Feed RSS

users:

Galleries:


• THE LUNAR EXPLORER ARCHIVES
• MOON
• MARS
• SOLAR SYSTEM
• DEEP SKY

A R C H I V E S

25143 - Itokawa is both an Apollo (the Apollo Asteroids are a group of near-Earth Asteroids, all named after the first one which was discovered, such as 1862 Apollo; these specific Celestial Bodies are Earth-crosser Asteroids, meaning that they have an orbital Semi-Major Axis greater than the one of Earth - > 1 Astronomical Unit (AU) - and a Perihelion Distance < 1,017 Astronomical Units. Some of these Bodies get very close to the Earth, making them a potential threat to our Home Planet (that is because the closer their Semi-Major Axis is to Earth's, the less eccentricity is needed for their orbit to cross the Earth's one) and Mars-crossing Asteroid.

Itokawa was the first Asteroid to be the target of a sample return mission, carried out by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) - Space Probe "Hayabusa".

Itokawa is an S-Type Asteroid and, through Radar imaging obtained by the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (or GDSCC - located in the Mojave Desert, California - USA) in 2001, it was observed an ellipsoid approx. 630 (± 60) mt long and 250 (± 30) mt wide. The JAXA - Hayabusa Mission confirmed these findings and also suggested that 25143 - Itokawa may be a so-called "contact binary" Asteroid, such as a Celestial Body formed by two or more smaller Asteroids that have gravitated toward each other until they got stuck together.

The Hayabusa images showed a surprising lack of Impact Craters on Itokawa as well as a very rough Surface. studded with Boulders, which was then described by the Mission Team as a "rubble pile".

Furthermore, the density of the Asteroid was found too low for it to be actually made from solid rock, and this would mean that 25143 - Itokawa is not a "monolith" (meaning a "solid block of rock") but rather a ‘rubble pile’ Asteroid, such as a Celestial Body formed from rocky fragments that have cohered over time (probably several hundreds of millions of years, or even more).