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<\/div>NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting asteroid Bennu since December 2018<\/a>, roughly 100 million miles from the Sun. And a recent discovery about the 1,600-foot space rock has scientists scratching their heads, Wired<\/em> reports<\/a>: Bennu keeps spitting out rocks, sometimes as large as several feet across, into space.<\/p> As detailed in a paper<\/a> published in the journal Science<\/em> last week, NASA researchers observed the asteroid ejecting matter “from otherwise unremarkable locations on Bennu.” They’ve observed Bennu spewing out small rocks at least three times<\/a> now since January 2019.<\/p> “Among Bennu’s many surprises, the particle ejections sparked our curiosity, and we’ve spent the last several months investigating this mystery,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement<\/a>. “This is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge of how asteroids behave.”<\/p> The researchers are trying to figure out what is causing these “ejection events.”<\/p> “No one has ever seen an active asteroid up close like this,” Carl Hergenrother, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, told Wired<\/em>. “It wasn’t that long ago that the conventional wisdom was that asteroids are these dead bodies that didn’t change very much.”<\/p> The scientists have several theories. Meteoroid impacts could have caused Bennu to eject smaller fragments. Or the asteroid’s wildly swinging surface temperatures could be dislodging rocks in a process called “surface stress fracturing.” Alternately, water vapor could be causing pressure to build up, leading particles to pop out at cracks and pores in boulders.<\/p> For now, though, scientists are left with more questions than answers.<\/p> “What we’re seeing is something we would have never been able to see from the ground,” Hergenrother told Wired<\/em>. “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?”<\/p> READ MORE: <\/strong>No One Knows Why Rocks Are Exploding From Asteroid Bennu<\/a> [Wired<\/em>]<\/p> More on Bennu:<\/strong> NASA Photographs Asteroid That Could Smash Into Earth in 22nd Century<\/a><\/em><\/p> The post NASA Baffled: Asteroid Bennu Keeps Spitting Out Small Rocks<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p> Continue reading here: NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting asteroid Bennu since December 2018 , roughly 100 million miles from the Sun. And a recent discovery about the 1,600-foot space rock has scientists scratching their heads, Wired reports : Bennu keeps spitting out rocks, sometimes as large as several feet across, into space. Continue reading
NASA Baffled: Asteroid Bennu Keeps Spitting Out Small Rocks<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"