Tuesday, 1 August 2023 – 10:01 WIB
LIVE Techno – In October 2020, the NASA (Aviation and Space Agency) OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached the asteroid Bennu. The probe has been orbiting its target for nearly two years, lowering the robotic arm and scooping up about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of rocky and dusty material from the asteroid’s surface.
This material is the first sample of an asteroid collected by a US mission, and might help scientists answer some puzzling questions such as how old is an asteroid like Bennu? And how long do they last?
To understand how long asteroids last, it’s important to know when and how they formed. The asteroids in our solar system coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk, the thick mass of dust and rocky material that revolved around our Sun 4.5 billion years ago.
“The dust started to clump together. Over time, these dust bunnies collected more material, collided with each other and stuck together. Some of them snowballed all over planets, like Earth. Others became moons, comets and asteroids,” said Harold Connolly, scientist for OSIRIS-REx
Most of the asteroids in the solar system are now in the asteroid belt, which runs between Mars and Jupiter, although occasionally some are knocked out of the belt and become near-Earth asteroids.
The largest intact asteroid is roughly the same age as the solar system at 4.5 billion years. But some asteroids can be considered younger, because they are made up of small, discrete pieces of these larger bodies.
Asteroid photographed by Hayabusa I.
2023-08-01 03:01:00
#Asteroids
