1. Enroll now: colorado.edu/spaceminor
15 Credit Hours • 1 Required Course: Pathway to Space • 4 Elective Courses
Enroll now: colorado.edu/spaceminor

2. Bepi-Colombo Launch from Kourou
Everything looks good!
Mercury arrival 2025

3. 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?

4. Kuiper Belt and Pluto
30 October 2018

17.  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.

18. Eris spectrum

19. Known Kuiper Belt Objects

25. Power-law
Distribution

28. Possible Kuiper Belt Debris Disks around other stars

33. Vesta close up

35. Rosetta
selfie

36. C-G
Close-up
From
Rosetta

37. Ultima Thule:2014 MU69 (green circles), the selected target
for the New Horizons Kuiper belt object mission

38. The location of 2014 MU69 and trajectory for rendezvous

39. 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