WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- A Japanese spacecraft's images of Itokawa indicate the 1,800-foot-long near-Earth asteroid may have had a space collision long ago.
The Washington Post reports the images and data from Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft found the surface of Itokawa is a jumble of boulders and gravel far less dense and far more porous than a solid piece of stone or metal, pointing to a prior collision.
"The pictures were just phenomenal, and so different from any other asteroids we've flown by," Olivier Barnouin-Jha of the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory told The Post.
NASA's Michael Zolensky said: "This is the first for-sure rubble-pile asteroid we've ever seen up close. The two big chunks -- the head and the body -- are just touching. The pieces are barely hanging on, and the fine-grained stuff fills in the gaps."
The two experts are members of a multinational team led by Akira Fujiwara of Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. The latest findings appear in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Scientists are studying the asteroid closely because of concerns a strike by one, even as small as Itokawa, on Earth could cause great damage.
