Bennu's "Star Grains" Helped Reveal Some New Secrets, About The Very Ancient Material That Became... Our Solar System.

Our imagination is always fired -- whenever we learn more about the "primordial" stuff (stargrains) that after billions and billions of years. . . of melting and refreezing and endless collisions. . . coalesced to become our home planet, and our the rocks we call our neighbors.

Do go read the long form NASA article -- it is excellent:

. . .Asteroid Bennu, sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020, is a mixture of dust that formed in our solar system, organic matter from interstellar space, and pre-solar system stardust. Its unique and varied contents were dramatically transformed over time by interactions with water and exposure to the harsh space environment.

These insights come from a trio of newly published papers based on the analysis of Bennu samples by scientists at NASA and other institutions.

Bennu is made of fragments from a larger parent asteroid destroyed by a collision in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. One of the papers, co-led by Jessica Barnes at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Ann Nguyen of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that Bennu’s ancestor was made up of material that had diverse origins -- near the Sun, far from the Sun, and even beyond our solar system. . . .

As the leftover materials from planetary formation 4.5 billion years ago, asteroids provide a record of the solar system’s history. But as Zega noted, we're seeing that some of these remnants differ from what has been found in meteorites on Earth, because certain types of asteroids burn up in the atmosphere and never make it to the ground. That, the researchers point out, is why collecting actual samples is so important. . . .

Now you know. And the forecast is for very little new material here. . . for about ten days, now. Keep it spinnin' in good karma, all. Onward.

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