Properties of rubble-pile asteroid (101955) Bennu from OSIRIS-REx imaging and thermal analysis
By D. DellaGiustina, J. Emery, D. Golish, B. Rozitis, C. Bennett, K. Burke, R. Ballouz, K. Becker, Philip R. Christensen, C. D. Drouet d’Aubigny and 49 more. Nature Astronomy, 2019
253 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Establishing the abundance and physical properties of regolith and boulders on asteroids is crucial for understanding the formation and degradation mechanisms at work on their surfaces. Using images and thermal data from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, we show that asteroid (101955) Bennu’s surface is globally rough, dense with boulders, and low in albedo. The number of boulders is surprising given Bennu’s moderate thermal inertia, suggesting that simple models linking thermal inertia to particle size do not adequately capture the complexity relating these properties. At the same time, we find evidence for a wide range of particle sizes with distinct albedo characteristics. Our findings imply that ages of Bennu’s surface particles span from the disruption of the asteroid’s parent body (boulders) to recent in situ production (micrometre-scale particles).Bennu’s surface presents evidence of a variety of particle sizes, from fine regolith to metre-sized boulders. Its moderate thermal inertia suggests that the boulders are very porous or blanketed by thin dust. Bennu’s boulders exhibit high albedo variations, indicating different origins and/or ages.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a0f16aa0e95e60b3b919b77765c0c71a2ecc53a
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Boulder size and shape distributions on asteroid Ryugu (2019, background): “, 2013), are considered to be the products of catastrophic disruption of their parent bodies (Fujiwara et al., 2006; Michikami et al., 2008; Jiang et al., 2015; Michel and Richardson, 2013; DellaGiustina et al., 2019).”
- Craters, boulders and regolith of (101955) Bennu indicative of an old and dynamic surface (2019, unknown): “The measured thermal inertia is consistent with a population of centimetre-sized particles 2 .”