Developing space weathering on the asteroid 25143 Itokawa

You'd expect the parent bodies of ordinary chondrites, the most common type of meteorite, to be abundant in the Solar System. But the S-type asteroids that dominate the main asteroid belt do not look like parent-body material. A possible explanation is that surfaces of the parent bodies become optically altered by 'space weathering'. This theory gets a boost with the discovery of extensive space weathering on the asteroid Itokawa, based on data from the Hayabusa asteroid-rendezvous spacecraft.