SCIENCE LAB SURPRISE : NATURE'S COSMIC WORKS

ROCK DUO : Early last month - an uncrewed Japanese spacecraft screamed past an asteroid named Torifune at 11, 000 miles [ 18, 000 kilometers ] per hour.

And as it hurtled within 2,600 feet [ 800 meters ] of its surface - extremely close, in space terms - it took a photo. Before this, very little was known about Torifune, except that it was an intriguing speck hurtling through the solar system.

It turned out that it was not one speck, but two : Torifune is a pair of asteroids that have been incongruously glued together.

'' Yeah, that's weird,'' said Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist and planetary defense researcher at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Asteroids move through space at such extreme speeds that on the unusual occasions where they meet one another, they cataclysmically break apart.

Torifune is known as a contact binary, meaning it's a pair of asteroids that have managed to get so close, in a surprisingly gradual and nonviolent way, that they have stuck together.

Contact binaries were once thought to be vanishingly rare, but in recent years astronomers have discovered several throughout our solar system.

In 2019, as NASA interplanetary spacecraft New Horizons was venturing beyond Neptune, it captured images of a red-hued snowman named Arrokoth.

And in 2023, while voyaging through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, NASA's Lucy spacecraft found that the asteroid Dinknesh had a smaller space rock orbiting it.

This ''moon,'' named Selam, was two asteroids squished together.

!WOW! thanks Robin George Andrews.