Crazy Watermelon in space

Binary asteroids, essentially miniature replicas of the Earth-moon system, are abundant in our cosmic neighbourhood. These include the Didymos-Dimorphos team that led NASA's 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Previous study shows that such binary asteroids originate when a rubble-pile "parent" asteroid—composed of loosely held rocks—spins so quickly that it sheds some of its mass, merging into the second, smaller satellite or "moonlet" asteroid.