ASTR 101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Tidal Force, Atmospheric Methane, Kuiper Belt
5 Sep 2016
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July 14th, 1965: mariner 4"s flyby of mars. July 14th, 2015: nasa"s new horizons spacecraft passed pluto and its five moons at 13. 8 km/sec, passing 12,504 km from the dwarf planet. Spacecraft clicked and whirred for 22 hours without stopping as it went past pluto. Spacecraft returned a sample of 8 gigabytes of images, spectra, and other observations stored in its memory. Charon likely assembled from debris thrown out when pluto suffered a titanic impact eons ago. Pluto has a heart shaped region that is about 1,600 km across. Pluto"s north pole, tipped 51 degrees toward the sun right now, appears to be frosted with frozen molecular nitrogen and methane. Heart"s western half is very smooth and flat (called sputnik planum) Sputnik planum reveals meandering, interconnected depressions that subdivide the terrain into crude polygons roughly 30 to 60 km across. Sp has a lack of crater impacts, so can"t be more than 100 million years old.
