Formation of the Solar System

Credit: NASA

The NASA research on Bennu was to send a spacecraft with satellite to research and to circle it. It will go out of its orbit to record surface images of the rocks on the asteroid to record its geographical features. Then then try to find the best spot to collect a sample of the asteroid. They will do multiple test runs before doing the actual thing and when they collect it they will exit the orbit and send a capsule with the sample back to earth. The reason why Bennu was really important was because it was there at the dawn of the solar system and it is still surviving and is near the earth. There are billions of stars in this solar system and to understand how the solar system is made we look at Bennu because it gives us information from 4.5 billion years ago. The raw ingredients of Bennu and the solar system were created in a huge cloud of dust, hydrogen and helium. There were nearby stars that exploded in a supernova and it makes the cloud to collapse and in about a 100,000 years and it flattens the gas into a disk shape and a protostar in formed in the center. The disk clumps of are heated to droplets of molten rocks called chondrules. The chondrules clump and grow into asteroids and planets. Next to the protostar a planet begins to form and then a prostar goes though fusion that reveals our sun. Jupiter formed after the sun was created and its huge gravity created the asteroids to go closer to the sun and enter the planets which could have brought organics and water. After this everything cools down and there is many years of calmness. There is a theory that says that there was a collision that hit the proto-planet that eventually started to move toward the sun and this was Benu. That is why NASA sent a spacecraft called Osiris-Rex to retrieve a sample from the asteroid because it has survived a long time and it could hold a lot of information that we can use. Like Bennu an asteroid that moved closer to the star and eventually formed planets. Planets closer to the star or in our case the sun will be more rocky because it is also more warmer. The more farther away from the sun, the more cold it gets making planets like Neptune really gassy and cold.