ANTRACELLA — New facts about the closest and potentially threatening asteroid to Earth, Asteroid Bennu, have surprised scientists. The surface of the asteroid Bennu acts like a collapsing zone that can absorb impacts. This fact will reconsider the way humans destroy asteroids that threaten our beloved planet.
The surface of the asteroid Bennu is full of craters. But data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission suggests many craters have mysteriously disappeared. The findings suggest that some unexpected geological processes are afoot in the 0.3-mile (0.5-kilometer) wide space rock that the American space probe recently visited.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent nearly two and a half years between 2018 and 2021 studying the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. The probe that lands will send tiny bits of space rock to Earth next year. To date, scientists have analyzed thousands of images and data collected by OSIRIS-REx.
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“This amount of data and images has made Bennu one of the best exploratory objects in the solar system,” said Edward Bierhaus, a space science researcher at Lockheed Martin and lead author of a new paper detailing the findings. Space.com.
“We have collected thousands of images and billions of LIDAR measurements that give us the topographical shape of Bennu. Now we have the most detailed topographic map of any object in the solar system.”
Bierhaus and his colleagues spent months examining the thousands of images. They learned more about how craters form on asteroids, and what they found surprised them.
Bennu with a width of 484 meters is full of craters, scientists found more than 1,500 of them, with widths ranging from 1-200 meters. The researchers then compared this figure with data on the frequency and intensity of crater-forming collisions on Earth, the moon, and other space objects. The calculations suggest that scientists should have found many more scars from the impact.
“Statistically, we expected to see more small craters,” Bierhaus said. “But they don’t exist.”
Mysterious disappearance…
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