Discovery and Naming
The asteroid was discovered in 1998 by the LINEAR project and was given the provisional designation 1998 SF36. In August 2003, it was officially named after Hideo Itokawa, a Japanese rocket scientist.
Read more about this topic: 25143 Itokawa
Famous quotes containing the words discovery and/or naming:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)