[Red Badger]

Ping!..................

[Terabitten]

This should be a cautionary tale for scientists everywhere. No matter how good you think your models are, reality trumps them every time.

[bk1000]

“The OSIRIS-REx team found a rough surface littered with boulders instead of the smooth, sandy beach they had expected based on observations from Earth- and space-based telescopes.”

But these same telescopes can accurately observe exoplanets and solar systems millions of light years from Earth. 😆

[pas]

So drilling down 500 feet to plant the nuclear warhead would only require cans of compressed air?

[null and void]

It’s possible that asteroids like Bennu — barely held together by gravity or electrostatic force — could break apart in Earth’s atmosphere and thus pose a different type of hazard than solid asteroids.

No kidding?

A hundred tons of solid rock hitting the atmosphere will scorch off a few tons on the way down, make a big sonic boom (think Chelyabinsk) thump into the ground and leave a smallish crater and local damage.

A hundred tons of gravel hitting the atmosphere will disintegrate and every single ounce of that hundred tons moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour will be exposed to static atmosphere at the same time, be frictionally super heated, flash from solid to white hot vapor. None of the solids will make it to the ground, but only as re-condensed pinheads of glassy rock. No crater.

On the other hand, the shock wave from all that energy released in a small space and time (think Tunguska) will flatten pretty much everything for 50 miles or more.

[Yardstick]

So Bennu is...fluffy?

[bunkerhill7]

Spaceballs

[BereanBrain]

So, if it’s constantly ejecting matter, how has it been doing it for “billions” of years? To be doing that, it would have had to start at the size of a small planet, which of course means it would not have been able to become the loose collection of debris it is today....

Inquiring minds want to know!

[JimRed]

It’s too small to have sufficient gravity to hold everything tightly together.

[Yollopoliuhqui]

Not left over from the birth of the Solar System. Left over from the destroyed planet that is now the Asteroid Belt. Google astronomer Tom Van Flandern.

[blam]

Good article. Thanks for posting.

[SuperLuminal]

Excellent news when things are not as simple as originally thought...

Budget propagandists rejoice...

[nesnah]

Sounds like the science wasn’t settled.