BiblioVault - Books about Stellar & Solar

Bennu 3-D

Anatomy of an Asteroid

Dante Lauretta, Brian May, Carina A. Bennett, Kenneth S. Coles, Claudia Manzoni, and C. W. V. Wolner

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.

In 2020 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Bennu and collected pristine asteroid material for delivery to Earth in September 2023. Scientific studies of the samples, along with data collected during the rendezvous, promise to help find answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions: Where did we come from? What is our destiny in space?

This book, the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

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The Galaxy and the Solar System

Roman Smoluchowski

University of Arizona Press, 1986

Originally published in 1986, this work came out of a conference held in Tucson, Arizona in January 1985, which had the purpose of emphasizing the influence of the Galaxy on the solar system rather than to discuss the Galaxy and the solar system per se. The meeting was the first get-together of the galactic and solar system scientific communities. At the time, the conversations covered new and sometimes controversial topics. This work presented the latest research and stimulated new research and ideas.

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Meteorites and the Early Solar System

John F. Kerridge

University of Arizona Press, 1988

First published in November 1988, this work provided a coherent narrative about the known understandings of meteorites and the early solar system.

From the original publication:

Although the Earth was formed, together with the other planets, at the birth of the solar system, geological activity has since erased all but a hint of the processes that accompanied its formation. If we wish to explore the processes that occurred in the earliest solar system, and the nature of the environment in which they took place, we must turn to the record contained in more primitive material. Many meteorites appear to satisfy that criterion, and much effort has been applied in identifying those meteorites, or their constituents, that have retained a reliable record of the early solar system. This book provides a synthesis of what has been learned so far about the earliest stages of solar system history through the study of meteorites, and what, given our current level of understanding, remains to be learned.

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Source Regions 3. Secondary Processing 4. Irradiation Effects 5. Solar System Chronology 6. Chondrites and the Early Solar System 7. Elemental Composition of Chondrites 8. Magnetic Fields in the Early Solar System 9. Chondrules10. Primitive Material Surviving in chondrites11. Micrometeorites12. Inhomogencity of the Nebula13. Survival of Presolar Material in Meteorites14. Nucleosynthesis15. Nucleocosmochronology16. Summary

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