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Kinder Surprise
After years of orbits and ultimately landings to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has made another surprising discovery.
Bennu, a rapidly rotating space rock orbiting near Earth, appears to be hollow, according to a press release. Not only that, but scientists from the University of Colorado, Boulder, who analyzed the lander’s new data, found that Bennu spins so fast that it also appears to be slowly tearing apart, gradually throwing rocks and dust into space.
Soft landing
When NASA landed, scientists were surprised both by how much Bennu crumbled under OSIRIS-REx and how much rock was blown away by the nitrogen puff it fired to release samples. But after running some data, it makes more sense: Bennu’s gravitational pull is surprisingly weak for an object of its size, leading researchers to conclude that it looks more like an egg with a shell than a solid piece of rock.
“It’s like there’s a void in its center that you can fit a couple of soccer fields into,” University of Colorado aerospace engineer and lead researcher Daniel Scheeres said in the release.
Sand storm
As Bennu spins, he occasionally swings the rocks outward. Some of them fall back, but others get lost in space, leading researchers to say that the rock will gradually rotate on itself. Death.
“You could imagine maybe in a million years or less, the whole thing will fly away,” Scheeres said in the statement.
READ MORE: Scientists peer into an asteroid [University of Colorado Boulder]
More on Bennu: NASA spacecraft grabbed too many asteroid fragments and are now drifting into space
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