UKC

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190524.html

I'm absolutely blown away by today's Astronomy Picture of the Day - it's amazing the sorts of images we're able to get now.

This one looks almost as if it could be on the Black Cuillin somewhere (and with the asteroid having only about half a kilometre diameter, I should be able to push my grade a bit, even on that crumbly rock!)

When I saw this thread title I did wonder if an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth and was pleasantly worried about something non political for a change! At least everyone would be united about an extinction event being bad.

Great photograph.

Wow.  In my head, I've always imagined asteroids as being completely smooth.  Lots of ridges and dips and stuff...but no boulders littering the surface.

Probably influenced by the Millennium Falcon flying through asteroid fields rather than reality I admit...

I thought exactly the same thing...

It certainly gives pause for thought regarding how we might go about deflecting such an asteroid if it was on collision course with Earth - you probably can't push it very hard without it falling apart, and I suspect that being hit by sixty million tons of rubble isn't much better than being hit by sixty million tons of solid rock.

looks suspiciously like a bit of Sgurr Dearg!

The standard pop science illustrations/animations of the asteroid belt (or Kuiper belt  / Oort cloud) must be among the most consistently misleading science illustrations ever: You typically see the sun in the distance, illuminating a great rubble field with lots of floating stuff. What you should actually see is pretty much nothing. 

CB

On a related note, here's a scale diagram of the Solar System, with our moon at one pixel:

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Excellent!

CB

Snowflake!

Why doesn't all the rubble fall off? Does something that small have a gravitational pull?

That is very fine. I particularly like the fact that I've just spent over 10 minutes scrolling a mostly black screen

Enough at least.

CB

Made it as far as Jupiter before concluding that space is in the main pretty boring

Depends on the size of the individual chunks and how much space is in between. If you can get it down to a cloud of bits it will burn off to nothing in the atmosphere, the bigger the chunk the more survives to hit the ground. On the other hand if the bits are very small and there are a lot of them they can cause global shadowing by floating about up there and blocking the sun, which means we can all drive cars for a bit longer. So swings and roundabouts.

The nineties called; they want their website back...

Great photo, though. From just 3.4 km away! Looks like a bit of a choss-pile...

“the OSIRIS-REx mission plans a TAG (Touch-and-Go) maneuver for July 2020 to sample Bennu's rugged surface, returning the sample to planet Earth in September 2023.”

We know how that movie plot develops...

a fifty year old film? The Andromeda Strain?

or even The Quatermass Experiment?

Life, Species, The Astronaut’s Wife, Venom...

I've just noticed that the scale solar system page has a button at the bottom right that sets it scrolling at light speed.

You can also change the units from km to a variety of others, such as Great Walls of China, or blue whales.

According to Google, Bennu's gravitational field at the surface is about 100,000 times weaker than Earth's. On the other hand, there wouldn't really be any other force on the rocks to encourage them to leave the surface so it might not take much to hold them together.