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+--- Thread: No one knows why rocks are exploding from asteroid Bennu (/thread-7914.html)
No one knows why rocks are exploding from asteroid Bennu - C C - Dec 7, 2019
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/12/no-one-knows-why-rocks-are-exploding-from-asteroid-bennu/
EXCERPT: For the last year, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been circling a large asteroid named Bennu that regularly passes uncomfortably close to Earth. [...] as detailed in a paper published this week in Science, NASA has already started making surprising discoveries around this alien world. Earlier this year, the OSIRIS-REx team witnessed particles exploding from the asteroid's surface—and the team's not sure why.
[...] Asteroid Bennu isn't really "alive" because it doesn't have a heated core necessary for geological activity, but as Hergenrother and his colleagues discovered, it's not exactly dead either. It's a space zombie roaming the solar system, sneezing out small rocks. Some quickly return to the surface like a cannonball, while others escape into the vast emptiness of deep space. But what's really intriguing, says Hergenrother, are the rocks that end up in orbit around Bennu and become miniature moons for a few days before returning to the surface.
"What we're seeing is something we would have never been able to see from the ground," Hergenrother adds. "So the question that is still on our minds is, 'Are we seeing a lower-intensity process that is similar to what happens on other active asteroids, or is this something entirely different?'" (MORE - details)