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March 20, 2020 10:00 am

Japan's Asteroid-Smashing Probe Reveals a Surprisingly Young Space Rock

Iwastheone shares a report from Space.com: A cannonball that [Japan's Hayabusa2 probe fired at Ryugu, a 2,790-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid] is shedding light on the most common type of asteroid in the solar system, a new study reports. [...] The cannonball, dubbed the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI), blasted out a crater about 47.5 feet (14.5 m) wide with an elevated rim and a central conical pit about 10 feet (3 m) wide and 2 feet (0.6 m) deep. The artificial crater was semicircular in shape, and the curtain of ejected material was asymmetrical. Both of these details suggest that there was a large boulder buried near the impact site, the researchers said. This conclusion matches the rubble-pile picture that scientists already had of Ryugu. Features of the artificial crater and the plume suggested that the growth of a crater was limited mostly by the asteroid's gravity and not by the strength of the space rock's surface. This, in turn, suggested that Ryugu has a relatively weak surface, one only about as strong as loose sand, which is consistent with recent findings that Ryugu is made of porous, fragile material. These new findings suggest that Ryugu's surface is about 8.9 million years old, while other models suggested that the asteroid's surface might be up to about 158 million years old. All in all, while Ryugu is made of materials up to 4.6 billion years old, the asteroid might have coalesced from the remains of other broken-apart asteroids only about 10 million years ago, Arakawa said. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

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