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Tag Archives: Solar System: Small SS Objects
Nucleobases in Asteroids
Nucleobases are the building blocks of DNA and RNA. There are five total nucleobases (adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil) and three of the five have been found in meteorites. Recently, the last two nucleobases have also been identified. Th… Continue reading
Posted in Class
Tagged asteroids, astro2110, blog7, Solar System: Small SS Objects
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Halley’s Comet
Halley’s Comet was the first comet understood to be a periodic comet, or a comet that can pass through the solar system multiple times. The English astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) noticed that the previously recorded orbits of three comets were ve… Continue reading
Posted in Class, Historical
Tagged astro2110, blog4, Solar System: Small SS Objects
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Comets: A Bunch of “Dirty Snowballs”
It is only right to dedicate a blog post to the very things that inspired my username: comets! Comets are small objects that orbit the Sun and tend to have more eccentric orbits than other bodies in the solar system. A comet consists of a nucleus, coma, ion tail, and dust tail. The nucleus is solidContinue reading “Comets: A Bunch of “Dirty Snowballs”” Continue reading
Posted in Class, Observables
Tagged astro2110, blog5, Comets, Solar System: Small SS Objects
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Ultima Thule
The New Horizons space probe was launched in 2006—primarily to study Pluto, but also to study Kuiper belt objects in its following years. Following the space probe’s flyby of Pluto in 2015, it reached 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule, on January 1, 2019. Ultima Thule is a Kuiper belt object that orbits 1.6 […] Continue reading
Posted in Instruments, Space Travel
Tagged astro2110, blog5, Kuiper Belt, new horizons, Solar System: Small SS Objects
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Recent Landslides on Ceres display Ice Content
A series of landslides on Ceres’ surface has been photographed last week, displaying solid evidence for frozen water comprising a sizable portion of its composition. Images displayed three different types of landslide classifications. Type I landslides are relatively round and large, similar to rock glaciers and landslides found on Earth. These landslides are found at […] Continue reading
Posted in General
Tagged astro2110, blog8, Ceres, geology, Solar System: Small SS Objects, Uncategorized, water
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New Horizons Probe Halfway Between Pluto and Its Next Target in Kuiper Belt
Just today, (April 4) the NASA probe New Horizons reached its halfway point between the Pluto system and its next target in the Kuiper belt, the small object 2014 MU69. 2014 MU69 is a trans-Plutonian, rather small Kuiper Belt object; with an average diameter of only about 30 miles it is only about 1% the size of […] Continue reading
Posted in Class, General, Space Travel
Tagged astro2110, blog5, charon, Kuiper Belt, new horizons, pluto, Solar System: Small SS Objects, Uncategorized
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Blog #5
An Overview of the New Horizons Mission The Kuiper Belt is a very fascinating region of our solar system consisting largely of icy bodies and comets. Thus, there is a lot of really interesting research aiming to better understand the Belt itself and the objects that call it home. One NASA initiative in this regard is … Continue reading Blog #5 Continue reading
Posted in Instruments
Tagged astro2110, blog5, kuiperbelt, Solar System: Small SS Objects, spacecraft
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Explore Vesta with Vesta Trek
Today, NASA released Vesta Trek, a free web-based application that provides a detailed visualization of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. This was made possible by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. This application includes interactive maps, the ability to print Vesta in a 3-D printer, […] Continue reading
Posted in Instruments
Tagged astro201, blog7, Ceres, dawn, NASA, Solar System: Small SS Objects, technology, vesta, VestaTrek
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