A team of European astronomers claims to have taken an unusual direct photograph of an object that may be a member of a class of strange space objects -- asteroid pairs that closely orbit one another.

Asteroid (216) Kleopatra, first discovered in 1880, previously was thought to be a solo dumbbell-shaped object, but it now appears in infrared images taken using the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile to be a pair of bright objects closely circling one another, separated by a thin space of unknown size.

Franck Marchis, Daniel Hestroffer and their colleagues used adapted optics on the telescope on Oct. 25 to look directly at Kleopatra, a Main Belt body with an elongated orbit that passes between Mars and Jupiter. They say the session showed that Kleopatra is comprised of two similarly sized lobes, neither of which is small enough to be called a moon.

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In June 1997, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft flew past the asteroid 253 Mathilde, sending back images of a crater-battered world about 52 kilometres in diameter, with five giant craters each over 20 km in diameter. Craters of such a size are generally surrounded by blankets of ejected material several kilometres deep, but on Mathilde there are no signs of such material.

The asteroid's unusually low density is thought to be part of the explanation for this lack of ejected material, and this is now confirmed by hypervelocity impact experiments carried out by Kevin R. Housen of The Boeing Company, Seattle, Washington, and colleagues. These experiments -- which involve firing projectiles at very high velocities at samples of a porous material -- suggest that the craters are produced by compaction, rather than excavation. Such a compaction process would result in relatively little ejected matter being lost into space, explaining why material from highly porous asteroids is a rarity in meteorites reaching Earth.

Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz, California discusses these findings in an accompanying News and Views article.

Some may resemble squeezable slabs of Styrofoam instead of brittle, dense rocks that shatter on impact, according to a new study. Planetary scientists have found striking similarities between craters blasted in soft soils in the lab and the pattern of gouges on an asteroid named Mathilde. They suggest that some asteroids absorb energy from collisions, growing smaller and denser over time rather than breaking apart as other cosmic objects pummel them.