Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2021

11 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING of existence represented by the god Osiris and great heron Bennu – life, fertility, death, rebirth, and cre- ation itself – all are reflected as much in the evolution of stellar sys- tems as they are in the immediate study of near-Earth asteroids. The cycle of “creation, life, death, and rebirth” is the story of our own solar system, for which the abun- dance of heavy elements that make up everything from the gas giants to the bulk of our own bodies is due to nucleosynthesis in ancient, almost unknowable stars. In the as- teroid Bennu, we see an astronom- ical body created and largely un- changed from a time when the so- lar system was well on its way to its modern arrangement. The geology of Bennu is a story of the chaos of creation that came from the colli- sions of planetesimals and proto- planets as the slow accretion of A rtist’s rendering of the TAGSAM arm on OSIRIS-REx approaching a sample site on Bennu. [NASA/God- dard Space Flight Center]