In the Solar System · tracked live
Itokawa
A near-Earth asteroid the size of a small town, and a pile of rubble rather than a rock - the pictures show it heaped together out of gravel with almost no craters. It is here because Hayabusa reached it in 2005 and, after a landing that went wrong, an engine failure and three years lost, brought home about 1,500 grains of it in 2010: the first material ever returned from an asteroid, and proof that the commonest meteorites come from bodies like this one.
- Radius
- 0 km
- Around the equator
- 1 km
- From the Sun
- 226,916,306 km (-469,131 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 244,206,383 km (-1,617,105 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 14 min
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.