13.1 Asteroids  (Page 6/8)

Looking down on the north pole of eros.

Eros has a good deal of loose surface material that appears to have slid down toward lower elevations. In some places, the surface rubble layer is 100 meters deep. The top of loose soil is dotted with scattered, half-buried boulders. There are so many of these boulders that they are more numerous than the craters. Of course, with the gravity so low on this small world, a visiting astronaut would find loose boulders rolling toward her pretty slowly and could easily leap high enough to avoid being hit by one. Although the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft was not constructed as a lander, at the end of its orbital mission in 2000, it was allowed to fall gently to the surface, where it continued its chemical analysis for another week.

In 2003, Japan’s Hayabusa 1 mission not only visited a small asteroid but also brought back samples to study in laboratories on Earth. The target S-type asteroid, Itokawa (shown in [link] ), is much smaller than Eros, only about 500 meters long. This asteroid is elongated and appears to be the result of the collision of two separate asteroids long ago. There are almost no impact craters, but an abundance of boulders (like a pile of rubble) on the surface.

Asteroid itokawa.

The Hayabusa spacecraft was designed not to land, but to touch the surface just long enough to collect a small sample. This tricky maneuver failed on its first try, with the spacecraft briefly toppling over on its side. Eventually, the controllers were successful in picking up a few grains of surface material and transferring them into the return capsule. The 2010 reentry into Earth’s atmosphere over Australia was spectacular ( [link] ), with a fiery breakup of the spacecraft, while a small return capsule successfully parachuted to the surface. Months of careful extraction and study of more than a thousand tiny dust particles confirmed that the surface of Itokawa had a composition similar to a well-known class of primitive meteorites. We estimate that the dust grains Hayabusa picked up had been exposed on the surface of the asteroid for about 8 million years.

Hayabusa return.

The most ambitious asteroid space mission (called Dawn) has visited the two largest main belt asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, orbiting each for about a year ( [link] ). Their large sizes (diameters of about 1000 and 500 kilometers, respectively) make them appropriate for comparison with the planets and large moons. Both turned out to be heavily cratered, implying their surfaces are old. On Vesta, we have now actually located the large impact craters that ejected the basaltic meteorites previously identified as coming from this asteroid. These craters are so large that they sample several layers of Vesta’s crustal material.

Vesta and ceres.

Ceres has not had a comparable history of giant impacts, so its surface is covered with craters that look more like those from the lunar highlands. The big surprise at Ceres is the presence of very bright white spots, associated primarily with the central peaks of large craters ( [link] ). The light-colored mineral is some kind of salt, either produced when these craters were formed or subsequently released from the interior.

White spots in a larger crater on ceres.

Key concepts and summary

The solar system includes many objects that are much smaller than the planets and their larger moons. The rocky ones are generally called asteroids. Ceres is the largest asteroid; about 15 are larger than 250 kilometers and about 100,000 are larger than 1 kilometer. Most are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The presence of asteroid families in the belt indicates that many asteroids are the remnants of ancient collisions and fragmentation. The asteroids include both primitive and differentiated objects. Most asteroids are classed as C-type, meaning they are composed of carbonaceous materials. Dominating the inner belt are S-type (stony) asteroids, with a few M-type (metallic) ones. We have spacecraft images of several asteroids and returned samples from asteroid Itokawa. Recent observations have detected a number of asteroid moons, making it possible to measure the masses and densities of the asteroids they orbit. The two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, have been extensively studied from orbit by the Dawn spacecraft.