Scientists have discovered that the surface of Asteroid 101955 Bennu resembles a plastic ball pit. They made this stunning discovery after examining data obtained when NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission took a sample from the space rock in October 2020.
This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on Jan. 19, 2019, was created by combining two images taken on board NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Other image processing techniques were also applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each image.
NASA OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Checks Out Asteroid Bennu Details
Scientists led by Kevin Walsh, whose study was published in the journal Science, said NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft recovered around 250 grams (or half a pound) of rock and dust from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu in October 2020. Next year, scientists will bring the sample back to Earth.
With a typical distance from the Sun of 105 million miles and a width of around 1,640 feet (500 meters), NASA said Bennu occasionally wanders very near to Earth.
SciTechDaily mentioned the spacecraft produced a cloud of debris that was 30 feet (9 meters) in length while collecting the sample.
Walsh and his colleagues explain in a separate piece in the journal Science Advance that after analyzing both the particles thrown up in the process and the pressures experienced by the spacecraft, they discovered the material is finer, less dense, and looser packed than the surface.
The crew examined the infrared signals from the particles since they made a touchdown on the spectrometer of the spacecraft. The material is probably rich in magnesium-containing minerals created by interactions with water, comparable to certain "chemically primitive" meteorites discovered on Earth, according to an earlier study. They claim that the most recent analysis supports that.
How Other Asteroids Broke Up
Axios mentioned that the first asteroids in the solar system are assumed to have broken up into smaller, stony entities like Bennu.
NASA said the solar system began 4.5 to 4.7 billion years ago when a cloud of gas and dust condensed to produce the sun, making these early asteroids appear to have formed just tens of millions of years later.
In the outer solar system, as rocks circling the Sun accumulated, ices and gases were also drawn into their mixture. More heat, more pressure, and more fluid and rock squeezing occurred as the bodies became larger.
In the early outer solar system, asteroids collided, breaking off pieces of rock that reassembled to form "rubble pile" asteroids like Bennu.
According to NASA, Bennu's current makeup is believed to have developed on a bigger, carbon-rich parent asteroid within 10 million years of the solar system's formation.
Will Bennu Disintegrate into Earth's Atmosphere?
A sample that was retrieved from asteroid Ryugu in late 2020 was examined as part of a different mission by the Japanese space agency, JAXA.
The meteorite matched a rare kind that had fallen in Tanzania in 1938.
The composition was transformed as the ice melted to water that cycled within the asteroid roughly 5.2 million years after the solar system began, according to radioisotope dating results, scientists stated in the journal Science.
Walsh stated that they are unaware of Bennu's origin or potential relatives. However, NASA said the OSIRIS-REx mission collected a sample and sent breathtaking, up-close photographs of the asteroid's surface to Earth, providing the most recent indication that Bennu was not what it first appeared to be.
Given how lightly the spaceship had touched down, scientists were perplexed by the large number of stones that were scattered around. The fact that the spaceship left a massive crater that was 26 feet (8 meters) broad made the situation much stranger.
Asteroids like Bennu, which are only tenuously held together by gravity or electrical force, might potentially disintegrate in Earth's atmosphere and represent a different kind of threat than solid asteroids.
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