In outer space, there are asteroids and moons, such as Hyperion which orbits Saturn, and Styx which orbits Pluto, that have been recorded to chaotically tumble and rotate. For someone living on one of these celestial bodies, one would not know which direction the sun would rise nor how long the day and night cycle would last. The reason why these bodies rigidly spin is because a torque is exerted on them by other bodies that exude a gravitational field; in particular, the tidal correction, or higher order asymptotic correction, to the gravitational force as a consequence of the spinning body having a finite size.
From recent work I've published, it appears that chaotic tumbling in outer space may be more generic than originally thought, particularly for bodies whose geometries are far from spherical. Consider two gravitational bodies (possibly asteroids or moons) that have orbits given by the blue and green trajectories and suppose we only study the blue body and its rotation. How does it rotate as the two bodies travel? As it turns out, the orientation (see left of blue bar) changes aperiodically, flipping around one direction before stopping and rotating in the opposite direction. Its rotation is an example of deterministic chaos of the Hamiltonian form, given that the total energy of the system stays the same for all time.
Right click here to download the video and play it on your favorite desktop media player!