The planets had finally finished growing. Now they would begin their long process of evolution towards the way we see them today. By now, about 100 million years had passed and the Solar Nebula was relatively sparse. Yet its activity did not stop completely. For the Solar System was still littered with fragments of debris that had not yet been ejected from the system by the giants or been swept up by the terrestrials. It was at this point that the Solar System entered what astronomers call, quite justifiably, the heavy bombardment phase.

For hundreds of millions of years, leftover scraps continued to rain down on the planets and their satellites. This is the battering that shaped the planets' and moons' crusts, and the majority of it occurred in the first 600 million years or so of their creation. A glance at the surface of the Moon gives ample reminder of this violent phase in the Solar System's history. Many of the craters there are well over 100 kilometres across. One of them is about 12 kilometres deep and 2500 kilometres across – greater than half the Moon's diameter. Called the Aitken basin, it is the largest known impact structure in the entire Solar System, carved out when the Moon was struck a glancing blow from a piece of rock and metal some 200 kilometres across. This constant barrage meant that the crusts of the terrestrial planets and moons oscillated between molten and solid states for many hundreds of millions of years. The heaviest elements sank to their centres, while the lighter substances, buoyed up, stayed near the surfaces.