Battered asteroid may have warm core
On July 10, 2010, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe flew by the asteroid 21 Lutetia, which at the time was the largest asteroid ever to have been visited by a spacecraft. The fly-by occurred 282 million miles from Earth; close-up images taken by the probe revealed cracks and craters running across Lutetia’s surface, evidence of the asteroid’s long and battered history.Now an international team of researchers from France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States has analyzed Lutetia’s surface images, and found that underneath its cold and cracked exterior, the asteroid may in fact harbor a molten-hot, metallic core. The findings suggest that Lutetia, despite billions of years of impacts, may have retained its original structure — a preserved remnant of the very earliest days of the solar system. The results are published in a series of three papers in the journals Science and Planetary Space Science (PSS). Benjamin...