Unlocking the origins of life starts with understanding how simple space molecules turned into complex building blocks. To do ...

Itokawa belongs to a class known as S-type asteroids, which are one of the most common types of objects in the asteroid belt. When the team investigated the samples collected from Itokawa, ...

Itokawa is an S-type asteroid, one of the most common objects found in the asteroid belt. Even though these objects are on the small side, they also maintain the materials they formed with.

Itokawa, which is about 2,000 feet long and 750 feet wide (610 by 229 meters), is thought to have broken off of a much larger parent body, and the team thinks frozen water and frozen hydrogen ...

Itokawa is what's called a "rubble pile," as it's made up of small fragments produced by collisions among asteroids and then slowly gathered together by gravity.

The Itokawa findings align with evolutionary models tracing life’s origins to over 3.5 billion years ago. During this era, simple organic molecules began forming RNA, proteins, and fatty acids.

Asteroids like Itokawa that formed interior to the snow line could therefore have been a potential source of water (up to 0.5 Earth’s oceans) during the formation of Earth and other terrestrial ...

If Itokawa held more water than that, she thought her team should be able to detect it. And it did: In two Itokawa grains, the team found between roughly 680 and 970 parts per million of water.

Itokawa does cross the Earth’s orbit during its 1.5-year-long path around the Sun, but calculations show it will probably never hit the planet.

Itokawa is an S-type asteroid, one of the most common objects found in the asteroid belt. Even though these objects are on the small side, they also maintain the materials they formed with.

Itokawa is an S-type asteroid, one of the most common objects found in the asteroid belt. Even though these objects are on the small side, they also maintain the materials they formed with.