Astronomers know we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s out there—and what perks or perils might be lurking in the darkness
Following a hunch that there might be a missing planet in between Mars and Jupiter, early 19th-century astronomers serendipitously discovered the first asteroids. Today, spacecraft missions provide scientists a closer look at these important building blocks of our solar system.
Beyond their makeup, the diverse movements of small bodies are revealing how important these worlds have been in shaping the star system we all call home.that houses OSIRIS-REx’s mission control contains the cavernous room where engineers build other NASA missions—including a robotic paleontologist of sorts that soon will trek toward Jupiter.
In 2005 Levison and his colleagues at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, published an influential hypothesis, now called the Nice model, which posits that the solar system began with many more small bodies than it has now, and that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune formed closer to the sun than they currently orbit. As small bodies gravitationally tugged at the gas giants, the planets’ orbits shifted until they slipped into an unstable configuration.
“This is the last stable population of minor planets that hasn’t been explored,” Olkin says. “The time is right.”astronomers know we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s out there—and what perks or perils might be lurking in the darkness. Mapping this celestial sea also is expected to find another 100,000 near-Earth asteroids that come within 121 million miles of the sun, some of which may be “potentially hazardous” like Bennu: objects wider than 500 feet, with orbits that take them within 4.7 million miles of Earth’s path around the sun. If we’ve learned anything from COVID-19, let alone the climate and extinction crises, it’s that the systems that undergird modern civilization are brittle.
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