Whatever Itokawa may look like, new research suggests that it has remained pristinely intact — despite incessant asteroid bombardment in the inner solar system — since it formed more than 4.2 billion years ago.

"In short, we found that Itokawa is like a giant space cushion, and very hard to destroy," Fred Jourdan, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia and the lead author of the new paper, said in a statement.

The team calculated Itokawa's age using specks of asteroid dust that were scooped by the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft and brought back to Earth in 2010.

For this, the researchers used another method called electron backscatter diffraction to measure the structures and orientations of crystals embedded inside the dust particles.

Although this method, called kinetic impact, was successful with DART, the authors of the new study warn it may be less efficient at deflecting shock-absorbent porous asteroids.

The kinetic impactor method is also most effective when we spot asteroids on collision courses with Earth well in advance, leaving enough time for a small change in orbit to build up.