NASA's Swift and Hubble Probe Asteroid Collision

摘要

Newly released data from NASA's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope suggest a small asteroid named Scheila that unexpectedly brightened late last year likely had just been struck by a much smaller asteroid, according to a NASA press release."Collisions between asteroids cre-ate rocket fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons," Dennis Bodewits, a University of Maryland astronomer and lead author of the Swift study, said in the April 28 press release.