Fresh imagery from slot asteroids Bennu and Ryugu helped inform the new findings, which might explain the pathways these space rocks take as they orbit the sun and occasionally, stray near Earth.
Fresh imagery from slot asteroids Bennu and Ryugu helped inform the new findings, which might explain the pathways these space rocks take as they orbit the sun and occasionally, stray near Earth.
"The more fine-grained material, or regolith, these asteroids lose, the faster they migrate," lead author Hsiang-Wen (Sean) Hsu, research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, said in a statement.Some "curious" photos captured at Bennu, as the scientists termed it, sparked the discussion. These came courtesy of an asteroid-sampling mission known as OSIRIS-REx and showed that the surface was sandpaper-like,
defying scientists expectations of smoothness. Similar images flowed from another recently studied asteroid called Ryugu, explored by a Japanese spacecraft known as Hayabusa2.
