NEO: Comets, Asteroids, and Meteors - reappears every 76 years.
Its next appearance is
in 2061.
Comets
- The word "comet" comes from the Greek o Comet Hale-Bopp
word for "hair.” - July 23, 1995- an unusually large and bright
comet was seen outside of Jupiter's orbit by
- Our ancestors thought comets were stars
Alan Hale of New Mexico and Thomas Bopp of
with what looked like flowing hair trailing
Arizona.
behind.
- Exceptionally large size.
- “Dirty Snowballs”
- It was visible even through bright city skies, and
- loose collections of ice, dust, and small
may have been the most viewed comet in
rocky particles whose orbits are usually very
long, narrow ellipses. recorded history.
- It will not appear again for another 2,400 years.
Structure of a Comet
o Comet Hyakutake (pronounced "hyah-koo-
I. Comet’s Head tah-kay")
- Coma - On January 30, 1996, Yuji Hyakutake an
Outer layer amateur astronomer from southern Japan,
(water vapor, CO2, and other gases) discovered a new comet using a pair of
- Nucleus binoculars.
Solid inner core
(frozen ice, gas and dust ) o Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
II. Comet’s tail - -Between July 16 and July 22, 1994, more than
- Tails gets longer the closer a comet gets to 20 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
the sun collided with the planet Jupiter. Astronomers
- Tails are always directed away from Sun. Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy
- Gas (ion) tail points straight away from Sun. discovered the comet in 1993. It was the first
- Dust tail curves toward orbital path collision of two Solar System bodies ever to be
III. Comet’s Orbit recorded.
- Comets move in an elliptical shaped orbit.
Comet Exploration
Origin of Comets
The Deep Impact spacecraft was launched in
o Kuiper belt December 2004 and encountered comet Tempel 1
-doughnut-shaped region that extends on July 4, 2005-mission that studied and impacted
beyond Neptune’s orbit to about 100 times comet Tempel 1.
Earth’s distance from the sun.
o Oort cloud
-spherical region of comets that surrounds Asteroids
the solar system out to more than 1,000
- A small and rocky space object.
times the distance between Pluto and the
- found in the asteroid belt located between
sun.
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
- made of metals, silicate, iron, nickel, and
Famous Comets carbon
o Comet Halley
- the most famous comet in history. How many asteroids are there?
- Each time this comet's orbit approaches the
- 40,000 known asteroids that are over 0.5 miles
Sun, its 15-km (9-mile) nucleus sheds about 6 m
(1 km) in diameter in the asteroid belt
(7 yards) of ice and rock into space. This debris
- 3,000 asteroids have been cataloged
forms an orbiting trail that, when falling to
- smaller asteroids (100,000)
Earth, is called the Orionids meteor shower.
- Classified by composition: stony, iron ,
or stony-iron.
Ceres (1801)
- first one discovered (and the biggest)
- 578 miles (930 km) What do we do if an NEO is approaching?
Asteroid becoming Moon
o Unknown… Still being experimented.
- can be pulled out of their solar orbit by the o Scientist are calculating ways to use nuclear
gravitational pull of a planet. They would then energy to divert an incoming object.
orbit that planet instead of orbiting the Sun. o High energy x-ray pulses produce a shock
- Astronomers theorize that the two moons of wave to push the NEO in the opposite
Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are captured direction.
asteroids.
Asteroid Strike
o Scientists hypothesize that one or more
large asteroids hit Earth 65 million years
ago and caused extinction of the dinosaurs.
o Scientists also hypothesize that the largest
mass extinction, 250 million years ago,
killing off 90% of all species was also caused
by a large asteroid.
Asteroid Exploration
o Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)
mission
- first of NASA's Discovery missions and the
first mission ever to go into orbit around an
asteroid (launched 1996).
- Studies were made of the asteroid Eros’
size, shape, mass, magnetic field,
composition, and surface and internal
structure (last data signals sent in 2001)
Meteoroids
- chunk of rock or dust in space.
- come from comets or asteroids.
Meteor
- When a meteoroid enters Earth’s
atmosphere, friction with the air creates
heat and produces a streak of light that
you can see in the sky.
- meteoroid that enters Earth’s
atmosphere and burns up
Meteorites
- Meteoroids that pass through the
atmosphere and hit Earth’s surface are
called meteorites.