Question

1. Make a list of five or more important & interesting properties of the Pluto/Charon system.

2. What is the Kuiper belt, what type of bodies does it contain (also name a few) & what is their significance?

3. How are comets classified, where do they originate & what information do they bring?

4. What are meteoroids, meteors & meteorites?

5. Characterize the asteroids, their locations, compositions & importance.

Answer 1

1) 1-If it was not orbiting Pluto, Charon would be a dwarf planet in its own right.

It may yet be determined a dwarf planet, particularly because it doesn’t orbit Pluto – instead, the two worlds orbit a common center of gravity. As they move, they keep the same face toward each other because they are tidally locked.

2-Charon MAY have ‘ice volcanoes’.

Observations made by ground-based observers at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii determined that Charon MAY have ice-particle geysers, a form of cryovolcanism.

3-Charon has a frigid surface, covered with methane and nitrogen ice, and possibly some water ice.

Although Charon is mostly ice by mass, it may contain a small rocky core.

4-Pluto's companion moon, Charon, is so large that the pair essentially form a binary system.

5-Charon orbits Pluto once every 6.39 days, which is also the rate at which Pluto spins on its axis. Charon is therefore in synchronous orbit about Pluto.

2)The Kuiper Belt is a collection of bodies outside the orbit of Neptune that, if nothing else had happened, if Neptune hadn’t formed or if things had gone a little bit better, maybe they could have gotten together themselves and formed the next planet out beyond Neptune. But instead, in the history of the solar system, when Neptune formed it led to these objects not being able to get together, so it’s just this belt of material out beyond Neptune.

-most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.

-Classical KBOs- typically have semi-major axes between about 42 and 48 AU and form the majority of objects detected so far in the Kuiper Belt. They typically have orbits of low eccentricity and inclination, suggesting that their orbits have not changed significantly since they condensed out of the solar nebula.

Resonance KBOs- inhabit one of the mean motion resonances with Neptune. The most populated is the 3:2 resonance, which contains Pluto and almost 25% of the detected KBOs (for obvious reasons called plutinos). The name of the resonance indicates that these objects complete 2 orbits around the Sun for every 3 orbits of Neptune.

Scattered KBOs- (scattered disk objects) have perihelia which lie within the Kuiper Belt (between about 30 and 48 AU), but they also have large orbital eccentricities. This means that their aphelia are located at distances greater than 60 AU, and that they spend only a very small fraction of their time close enough to the Sun to be detected by current observational surveys. For this reason only a small number of scattered KBOs are known.

3)A short period or periodic comet is a comet that typically originates from the Kuiper belt and has a predictable orbit around the sun. ... Comets such as Kohoutek originated from the Oort Cloud and appears once every 75 thousand years or so, these type of comets are long period or non-periodic comets.

Some researchers think comets might have originally brought some of the water and organic molecules to Earth that now make up life here. To research this hypothesis, the Rosetta mission, which landed a probe on a comet on Nov. 12, 2014, is studying its nucleus and environment, observing how it changes as it approaches the sun.

Comets orbit the sun, but most are believed to inhabit in an area known as the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Occasionally a comet streaks through the inner solar system; some do so regularly, some only once every few centuries.

4)A meteor is the streak of light that you see in the sky when a small piece of cometary or asteroidal material enters the atmosphere at high speed and burns up because of the frictional heating from the piece’s collision with the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere. Before the small bit of comet or asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it floats through interplanetary space and is called a meteoroid.

Most meteoroids that enter the atmosphere burn up completely as meteors. In some cases, however, the meteoroid does not completely burn up, and the object actually makes it to Earth’s surface. The chunk that has survived its fiery journey is called a meteorite. A small body starts its life as a meteoroid floating through space between the planets until it makes a bright streak of light in Earth’s atmosphere as a meteor and then, if it isn’t consumed by frictional heating, finally lands on the ground as a meteorite.

5)Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) circle closer to Earth than the sun. Amor asteroids have close orbits that approach but no not cross Earth's path, according to NASA. Apollo asteroids have Earth-crossing orbits but spend most of their time outside the planet's path. Aten asteroids also cross Earth's orbit but spend most of their time inside Earth's orbit. Atira asteroids are near-Earth asteroids whose orbits are contained within Earth's orbit. According to the European Space Agency, roughly 10,000 of the known asteroids are NEAs.

-Asteroids lie within three regions of the solar system. Most asteroids lie in a vast ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This main asteroid belt holds more than 200 asteroids larger than 60 miles (100 km) in diameter. Scientists estimate the asteroid belt also contains between 1.1 million and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 km (3,281 feet) in diameter and millions of smaller ones.

-In addition to classifications of asteroids based on their orbits, most asteroids fall into three classes based on composition:

The C-type or carbonaceous asteroids are grayish in color and are the most common, including more than 75 percent of known asteroids. They probably consist of clay and stony silicate rocks, and inhabit the main belt's outer regions.

The S-type or silicaceous asteroids are greenish to reddish in color, account for about 17 percent of known asteroids, and dominate the inner asteroid belt. They appear to be made of silicate materials and nickel-iron.

The M-type or metallic asteroids are reddish in color, make up most of the rest of the asteroids, and dwell in the middle region of the main belt. They seem to be made up of nickle-iron.

-The scientific interest in asteroids is due largely to their status as the remnant debris from the inner solar system formation process. Because some of these objects can collide with the Earth, asteroids are also important for having significantly modified the Earth's biosphere in the past. They will continue to do so in the future. In addition, asteroids offer a source of volatiles and an extraordinarily rich supply of minerals that can be exploited for the exploration and colonization of our solar system in the twenty-first century.

Asteroids represent the bits and pieces left over from the process that formed the inner planets, including Earth. Asteroids are also the sources of most meteorites that have struck the Earth's surface and many of these meteorites have already been subjected to detailed chemical and physical analyses.