Itokawa

Itokawa, named after Japanese rocket engineer Hideo Itokawa, is a peanut-shaped asteroid discovered by the LINEAR programme in 1998. It is the first target of Japan’s Hayabusa space probe that collected samples from the asteroid’s surface in 2005 and returned it in 2010. In this sample, water and organic matter was detected. This is the first-ever discovery of raw life components on an asteroid.