25143 Itokawa size and scale context

25143 Itokawa is the small near-Earth asteroid that Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft landed on in 2005, scooping up grains and returning them to Earth in 2010 – the first sample ever brought back from an asteroid. Hayabusa revealed it to be a rubble pile, a loose heap of fragments held together by gravity rather than a single solid rock. Read its scale context, comparisons, and journey links on the canonical object page.