Asteroids smaller than 10 km are thought to be rubble piles formed from the reaccumulation
of fragments produced in the catastrophic disruption of parent bodies. Ground-based …

Spacecraft observations revealed that rocks on carbonaceous asteroids, which constitute
the most numerous class by composition, can develop millimeter-to-meter-scale fractures …

When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft pressed its sample collection mechanism into the surface
of Bennu, it provided a direct test of the poorly understood near-subsurface physical …

This paper summarizes the evidence for the optical effects of space weathering, as well as
the properties of the surface that control optical changes, on asteroid (101955) Bennu. First …

Abstract The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith
Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft mission characterized and collected a sample from …

NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, collected a sample from the
surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and will deliver it to Earth in …

Returned samples from Cb-type asteroid (162173) Ryugu exhibit very dark spectra in visible
and near-infrared ranges, generally consistent with the Hayabusa2 observations. A critical …

Asteroid interiors play a key role in our understanding of asteroid formation and evolution.
As no direct interior probing has been done yet, characterisation of asteroids' interiors relies …

On asteroids, fractures develop due to stresses driven by diurnal temperature variations at
spatial scales ranging from sub-millimetres to metres. However, the timescales of such rock …

Thermal fatigue has been proven to be of fundamental importance for the nature and
evolution of surfaces of airless bodies in the solar system. It is a rock erosive process acting …