Saverio Cambioni (MIT): "Rock Porosity Controls How Asteroids' Surfaces Look"

The general lack of fine-grained materials on asteroids Bennu and Ryugu was an important discovery of the NASA OSIRIS-REx and JAXA Hayabusa 2 missions, as it was contrary to the expectations from ground-based observations and previous asteroid missions. In my talk, I will present our recent findings (Cambioni et al., 2021, Nature) that the high porosity of the rocks on Bennu and Ryugu is responsible for the lack of fine-grained materials, because rocks fragment less efficiently if they are highly porous. I will argue how this could be a general phenomenon of asteroids. Finally, because we used machine learning in this project, I will conclude by discussing the potentialities and challenges of using machine learning to advance the planetary sciences.