Rocks everywhere

2001/09/27 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Astronomia

The asteroid Eros became famous in the media last February, by landing the probe NEAR-Shoemaker. It was an unexpected success but not the last: The researcher has surprised the shopping surfaces.

"It's like a lot," says an astronomer who has worked on the photos of Eros. In fact, there are hundreds of fragments of rocks scattered across the surface of the asteroid, which according to all indications are a consequence of a single shock. It seems that 1,000 million years ago a body collided with Eros. As a consequence, he created a crater of 7.6 kilometers wide and a lot of waste. The remains, fragments of rock, were thrown into space, but many did not flee the asteroid's gravity force and landed on the surface. As the gravity force of asteroids is weak, it was thought that it was not possible, but Eros has shown the opposite. It is about clarifying whether the same occurs with other asteroids or whether this is an exception.

There are many questions to answer. For example, all these residues are from the same crater, but in Eros there are many craters. Where are the residues of others? Why did he lose some and not others? The surface rocks are eroded, but in Eroski there is no water or atmosphere. How has erosion occurred?

But even more mysterious are the "dust pools" of Eroski. In surface depressions, hundreds of lagoons have been detected that were posed in one of these NEAR probes. They are about 10 meters wide and a few meters deep, and the content seems to be a kind of dry cement. The researchers try to figure out how these coffers have been created, which are very curious.

Additional information: Space meeting Rock garden on Eros

Aromatizing the rock