1 Space Rocks Impacts of our smallest neighbors. 2 Asteroid Belt.
-
Upload
emory-mccormick -
Category
Documents
-
view
215 -
download
0
Transcript of 1 Space Rocks Impacts of our smallest neighbors. 2 Asteroid Belt.
1
Space Rocks
Impacts of our smallest neighbors
2
Asteroid Belt
Asteroid Belt
3
The four inner planets formed, but Jupiter’s huge gravity caused
chaos in the region past Mars. No big planet ever formed there
Primitive Solar System
4
Craters in the Inner Solar System
Mars’s Southern HighlandsMercury
5
Impacts on Moons
Mars’s tiny moon Phobos
Mimas, a moon of Saturn
6
Lunar Cratering
Our Moon shows a history of impacts
Most of these occurred long ago…
7
8
The Asteroid Belt is Sparse
On average, there are more than 1 million km between asteroids
9
DynamicCollisionsDo Occur
And the effects are seen throughout the Solar System
10
Jupiter Shows Recent ImpactsThe world watched as a
comet collided with Jupiter in 1994
Possibly not as rare as we thought. Other collisions have occurred since, like
this one in 2009
11
More than 170 Impact Craters on Earth
12
Earth Erases History of Impacts
Wolf Creek, Australia
Roter Kamm, Namibia
Barringer Crater, Arizona
13
Chicxulub and the Dinosaurs
14
Recent Earth Impacts
Tunguska in Russia 1909
2008 TC3- first celestial object
tracked by astronomers before entering Earth’s atmosphere
15
MeteoritesChunks of asteroids sometimes make it through
the atmosphere to the ground
These are time capsules telling us about how matter came together in the early Solar System
16
Future Impacts• Meteoroids smaller than a house will
explode in our atmosphere5-10 meter objects hit about once a year
• Larger objects are rare but devastating
We don’t know when the next big impact will happen, but it will eventually
17
Can we Stop an Impact?Our best chance of avoiding an impact is having advance notice of a threat
18
NASA’s WISE Mission
Using Infraredtechnology to see dark asteroids WISE finds asteroids - including
some seen for the first time 100,000s of Main Belt Asteroids 100s of Near-Earth Objects
(NEOs)
19
The Challenge Could be OursIf we do find an asteroid headed for Earth…