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Bepi-Colombo Launch from Kourou Everything looks good! Mercury arrival 2025
BepiColombo to Mercury Of all the major planets in our solar system, Mercury is, by far, one of the most difficult planets to see and study. Always relatively close to the sun, visible only low in the western sky at dusk or low in the eastern sky during dawn. Adifficult place to send a spacecraft to, since being located as close to the sun – and thus the sun’s gravity – reducing orbital speeds to Mercury is an energy-consuming task. BepiColombo was successfully launched from Kourou, French Guiana on Oct. 19 with a destination of Mercury. Are the water ice deposits in shaded craters near Mercury’s North Pole – initially detected by Earth-based radar measurements in the early 1990s and confirmed by MESSENGER – also found near its South Pole? And, ultimately, what does all this tell us about the formation of the rest of the solar system, including Earth?
Kuiper Belt and Pluto 30 October 2018
The Greek goddess of strife and discord. Eris is the ninth most massive object directly orbiting the Sun An image of the dwarf planet Eris and its moon Dysnomia.
Eris spectrum
Known Kuiper Belt Objects
Power-law Distribution
Possible Kuiper Belt Debris Disks around other stars
Vesta close up
Rosetta selfie
C-G Close-up From Rosetta
Ultima Thule:2014 MU69 (green circles), the selected target for the New Horizons Kuiper belt object mission
The location of 2014 MU69 and trajectory for rendezvous
Kuiper Belt Summary Kuiper Belt has more mass than Asteroid Belt: small, icy bodies, discovered in 1992 It is exterior to Neptune, and the primary source of short-period (P<200yr) comets Classical, resonant, scattered KBO’s Pluto is the largest Collisions are important: These objects are likely ‘rubble piles’. Power-law size distribution Oort Cloud is about 10,000AU from the Sun is the reservoir of long-period comets