Asteroids Provide Hints About the "Ingredients" in Planets - PBS

Asteroids Provide Hints About the "Ingredients" in Planets

Published: November 3, 2020

Narrator: A deeper understanding of near-Earth asteroids could help future scientists design a mission to deflect or disrupt these potential killers, but they can also help reveal secrets of Earth’s distant past.

Derrick Pitts: Asteroids actually are remnants left over from the earliest periods in the history of our solar system. They essentially have, locked up inside them, many of the secrets of what the solar system was like when it first began.

Narrator: Four-point-five-billion years ago, as the planets in our solar system formed, gas and dust stuck together, forming pebbles.

Maitrayee Bose: These are the earliest formed solids that you can find.

Narrator: Pebbles grew into boulders…

Bose: Of course, in all this mess, there’s lots of collisions going on.

Narrator: …boulders into mountain-sized asteroids.

Bose: You have all these asteroids hitting each other. You have protoplanets that are being hit by these asteroids. It’s chaotic.

Narrator: When the dust settled, the planets had taken shape, but there was plenty of material left over, millions of small chunks of rock, metal and ice…

Patrick Michel: These asteroids are actually tracers of our history. So, if you take a planet, a planet is like an omelet.

Narrator: …a complex mix of ingredients, assembled bit by bit.

Michel: You start with two yellow eggs…

Pitts: …perhaps a pepper, an onion…

Paul Sánchez: …salt and, possibly, cheese.

Michel: You put them in a pan, and it warms up, and then it’s transformed into an omelet.

So, if I show you an omelet, and you never saw eggs before, you would never be able to deduce that you started with eggs.

Narrator: Just like an omelet, Planet Earth’s ingredients have been scrambled and cooked over time.

Sánchez: Earth has been changing. You have volcanoes, earthquakes. And it’s difficult to know exactly what Earth was like at the very beginning of the formation.

Vicky Hamilton: Asteroids like Bennu, on the other hand, are remnants of that very, very earliest part of solar system history. So, they’re little time capsules that record what kinds of chemistry was present

Narrator: And they may contain some of the same key ingredients in Earth’s original recipe, including one very special ingredient that none of us could live without.

Dante Lauretta: We knew Bennu was very dark. And that was one of the prime reasons that we picked it. We think that means that it has a lot of carbon on its surface, particularly in organic molecules.

Narrator: Carbon forms the backbone of all life on Earth. It’s in land, air and the ocean and in every plant and animal. But how did it all get here?

Pitts: It would be much easier if we could just say that carbon was right here to begin with, but if we actually look at the very earliest history of the development of Earth, the first six-hundred-million years, this planet is entirely molten. It’s a cauldron of lava and magma.

Narrator: With surface temperatures estimated at least 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, any carbon near Earth’s molten surface would have evaporated into space.

Pitts: So, we still have this mystery on our hands of, “how did carbon get to this planet?”

Narrator: Did this key ingredient for life actually hitch a ride to Earth on comets and asteroids?

Michel: One of the ideas is that this impact brought all the elements that favor the emergence of life on Earth.

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Asteroids Provide Hints About the "Ingredients" in Planets - PBS
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