Comets

We now know that comets are leftovers from the dawn of our solar system around 4.6
billion years ago, and consist mostly of ice coated with dark organic material. They have been
referred to as "dirty snowballs." They may yield important clues about the formation of our
solar system. Comets may have brought water and organic compounds, the building blocks of
life, to the early Earth and other parts of the solar system.

As theorized by astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951, a disc-like belt of icy bodies

exists beyond Neptune, where a population of dark comets orbits the sun in the realm of
Pluto. These icy objects, occasionally pushed by gravity into orbits bringing them closer to
the sun, become the so-called short-period comets. Taking less than 200 years to orbit the
sun, in many cases their appearance is predictable because they have passed by before. Less
predictable are long-period comets, many of which arrive from a region called the Oort Cloud
about 100,000 astronomical units (that is,?100,000 times the distance between Earth and the
Sun) from the Sun. These Oort Cloud comets can take as long as 30 million years to complete
one trip around the Sun.
Each comet has a tiny frozen part, called a nucleus, often no larger than a few
kilometers across. The nucleus contains icy chunks, frozen gases with bits of embedded dust.
A comet warms up as it nears the Sun and develops an atmosphere, or coma. The sun's heat
causes the comet's ices to change to gases so the coma gets larger. The coma may extend
hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The pressure of sunlight and high-speed solar particles
(solar wind) can blow the coma dust and gas away from the Ssun, sometimes forming a long,
bright tail. Comets actually have two tails - a dust tail and an ion (gas) tail.
Most comets travel a safe distance from the sun - comet Halley comes no closer than
89 million kilometers (55 million miles). However, some comets, called sungrazers, crash
straight into the Sun or get so close that they break up and evaporate.
Scientists have long wanted to study comets in some detail, tantalized by the few
1986 images of comet Halley's nucleus. NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft flew by comet
Borrelly in 2001 and photographed its nucleus, which is about 8 kilometers (5 miles) long.
NASA's Stardust mission successfully flew within 236 kilometers (147 miles) of the
nucleus of Comet Wild 2 in January 2004, collecting cometary particles and interstellar dust
for a sample return to Earth in 2006. The photographs taken during this close flyby of a
comet nucleus show jets of dust and a rugged, textured surface. Analysis of the Stardust
samples suggests that comets may be more complex than originally thought. Minerals formed

near the Sun or other stars were found in the samples, suggesting that materials from the
inner regions of the solar system traveled to the outer regions where comets formed.
Another NASA mission, Deep Impact, consisted of a flyby spacecraft and an
impactor. In July 2005, the impactor was released into the path of the nucleus of comet
Tempel 1 in a planned collision, which vaporized the impactor and ejected massive amounts
of fine, powdery material from beneath the comet's surface. En route to impact, the impactor
camera imaged the comet in increasing detail. Two cameras and a spectrometer on the flyby
spacecraft recorded the dramatic excavation that helped determine the interior composition
and structure of the nucleus.
After their successful primary missions, the Deep Impact spacecraft and the Stardust
spacecraft were still healthy and were retargeted for additional cometary flybys. Deep
Impact's mission, EPOXI (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Deep Impact Extended
Investigation), comprised two projects: the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI),
which encountered comet Hartley 2 in November 2010, and the Extrasolar Planet
Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) investigation, which searched for Earth-size
planets around other stars on route to Hartley 2. NASA returned to comet Tempel 1 in 2011,
when the Stardust New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT) mission observed changes in the
nucleus since Deep Impact's 2005 encounter.

How Comets Get Their Names

Comet naming can be complicated. Comets are generally named for their discoverer -- either
a person or a spacecraft. This International Astronomical Union guideline was developed only
in the last century. For example, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was so named because it was the
ninth short-periodic comet discovered by Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy.
Since spacecraft are very effective at spotting comets many comets have LINEAR, SOHO or
WISE in their names.

Significant Dates

1070-1080: The comet later designated Halley's Comet is pictured in the Bayeux
Tapestry, a chronicle of the Battle of Hastings of 1066.

1449-1450: Astronomers make one of the first known efforts to record the paths of
comets across the night sky.

1705: Edmond Halley publishes that the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 are the same
object and predicts its return in 1758. The comet arrives on schedule and is later
named Halley's Comet.

1986: An international fleet of five spacecraft converges on comet Halley as it makes

its regular (about every 76 years) pass through the inner solar system.

1994: In the first observed planetary impact by a comet, awed scientists watch as
fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smash into Jupiter's atmosphere.

2001: Deep Space 1 flies by and photographs comet Borrelly.

2004: NASA's Stardust spacecraft collects dust samples from comet Wild 2 and
images the nucleus.

2005: The Deep Impact impactor collides with comet Tempel 1 to enable scientists to
study the interior of the nucleus.

2006: The Stardust sample return capsule lands in Utah carrying cometary particles
and interstellar dust.

2009: Scientists announce that the amino acid glycine, a building block of life, was
collected by the Stardust spacecraft from comet Wild 2.

2010: The Deep Impact spacecraft studies its second cometary target, Hartley 2, a
small, hyperactive comet.

2011: The Stardust spacecraft encounters Tempel 1 and captures views of the Deep
Impact impact site, the opposite side of the nucleus, and evolution on the comet's
surface.

Asteroids

Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky remnants left over from the
early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
Most of this ancient space rubble can be found orbiting the sun between Mars and
Jupiter within the main asteroid belt. Asteroids range in size from Vesta - the largest at about
329 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter - to bodies that are less than 33 feet (10 meters)
across. . The total mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth's Moon.

Most asteroids are irregularly shaped, though a few are nearly spherical, and they are
often pitted or cratered. As they revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, the asteroids also
rotate, sometimes quite erratically, tumbling as they go. More than 150 asteroids are known

to have a small companion moon (some have two moons). There are also binary (double)
asteroids, in which two rocky bodies of roughly equal size orbit each other, as well as triple
asteroid systems.
The three broad composition classes of asteroids are C-, S-, and M-types. The C-type
(chondrite) asteroids are most common, probably consist of clay and silicate rocks, and are
dark in appearance. They are among the most ancient objects in the solar system. The S-types
("stony") are made up of silicate materials and nickel-iron. The M-types are metallic (nickeliron). The asteroids' compositional differences are related to how far from the sun they
formed. Some experienced high temperatures after they formed and partly melted, with iron
sinking to the center and forcing basaltic (volcanic) lava to the surface. Only one such
asteroid, Vesta, survives to this day.
Jupiter's massive gravity and occasional close encounters with Mars or another object
change the asteroids' orbits, knocking them out of the main belt and hurling them into space
in all directions across the orbits of the other planets. Stray asteroids and asteroid fragments
slammed into Earth and the other planets in the past, playing a major role in altering the
geological history of the planets and in the evolution of life on Earth.
Scientists continuously monitor Earth-crossing asteroids, whose paths intersect Earth's
orbit, and near-Earth asteroids that approach Earth's orbital distance to within about 45
million kilometers (28 million miles) and may pose an impact danger. Radar is a valuable tool
in detecting and monitoring potential impact hazards. By reflecting transmitted signals off
objects, images and other information can be derived from the echoes. Scientists can learn a
great deal about an asteroid's orbit, rotation, size, shape, and metal concentration.
Several missions have flown by and observed asteroids. The Galileo spacecraft flew
by asteroids Gaspra in 1991 and Ida in 1993; the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEARShoemaker) mission studied asteroids Mathilde and Eros; and the Rosetta mission
encountered Steins in 2008 and Lutetia in 2010. Deep Space 1 and Stardust both had close
encounters with asteroids.
In 2005, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa landed on the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa
and attempted to collect samples. On June 3, 2010, Hayabusa successfully returned to Earth a
small amount of asteroid dust now being studied by scientists.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, launched in 2007, orbited and explored asteroid Vesta for
over a year. Once it left in September 2012, it headed towards dwarf planet Ceres, with a
planned arrival of 2015. Vesta and Ceres are two of the largest surviving protoplanet bodies
that almost became planets. By studying them with the same complement of instruments on
board the same spacecraft, scientists will be able to compare and contrast the different
evolutionary path each object took to help understand the early solar system overall.
Asteroid
Classifications
Main asteroid belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between
Mars and Jupiter, generally with not very elongated orbits. The belt is estimated to contain
between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter, and
millions of smaller ones. Early in the history of the solar system, the gravity of newly formed
Jupiter brought an end to the formation of planetary bodies in this region and caused the

small bodies to collide with one another, fragmenting them into the asteroids we observe
today.
Trojans: These asteroids share an orbit with a larger planet, but do not collide with it because
they gather around two special places in the orbit (called the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points).
There, the gravitational pull from the sun and the planet are balanced by a trojan's tendency to
otherwise fly out of the orbit. The Jupiter trojans form the most significant population of
trojan asteroids. It is thought that they are as numerous as the asteroids in the asteroid belt.
There are Mars and Neptune trojans, and NASA announced the discovery of an Earth trojan
in 2011.
Near-Earth asteroids: These objects have orbits that pass close by that of Earth. Asteroids
that actually cross Earth's orbital path are known as Earth-crossers. As of June 19, 2013,
10,003 near-Earth asteroids are known and the number over 1 kilometer in diameter is
thought to be 861, with 1,409 classified as potentially hazardous asteroids - those that could
pose a threat to Earth.
How Asteroids Get Their Names
The International Astronomical Union's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature.is a little
less strict when it comes to naming asteroids than other IAU naming committees. So out there
orbiting the sun we have giant space rocks named for Mr. Spock (a cat named for the
character of "Star Trek" fame), rock musician Frank Zappa, regular guys like Phil Davis, and
more somber tributes such as the seven asteroids named for the crew of the Space Shuttle
Columbia killed in 2003. Asteroids are also named for places and a variety of other things.
(The IAU discourages naming asteroids for pets, so Mr. Spock stands alone).
Asteroids are also given a number, for example (99942) Apophis. The Harvard Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics keeps a fairly current list of asteroid names.
Significant Dates

1801: Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the first and largest asteroid, Ceres, orbiting between
Mars and Jupiter.

1898: Gustav Witt discovers Eros, one of the largest near-Earth asteroids.

1991-1994: The Galileo spacecraft takes the first close-up images of an asteroid
(Gaspra) and discovers the first moon (later named Dactyl) orbiting an asteroid (Ida).

1997-2000 : The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft flies by Mathilde and orbits and lands
on Eros.

1998: NASA establishes the Near Earth Object Program Office to detect, track and
characterize potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that could approach Earth.

2006: Japan's Hayabusa becomes the first spacecraft to land on, collect samples and
take off from an asteroid.

2006: Ceres attains a new classification -- dwarf planet -- but retains its distinction as
the largest known asteroid.

2007: The Dawn spacecraft is launched on its journey to the asteroid belt to study
Vesta and Ceres.

2008: The European spacecraft Rosetta, on its way to study a comet in 2014, flies by
and photographs asteroid Steins, a type of asteroid composed of silicates and basalts.

2010: Japan's Hayabusa returns its asteroid sample to Earth.

2010: Rosetta flies by asteroid Lutetia, revealing a primitive survivor from the violent
birth of our solar system.

2011-2012: Dawn studies Vesta. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit a main-belt
asteroid and continues on to dwarf planet Ceres in 2015.

Meteors & Meteorites

Shooting stars, or meteors, are bits of interplanetary
material falling through Earth's atmosphere and heated to
incandescence by friction. These objects are called meteoroids as
they are hurtling through space, becoming meteors for the few
seconds they streak across the sky and create glowing trails.

Scientists estimate that 44 tonnes (44,000 kilograms,

about 48.5 tons) of meteoritic material falls on the Earth each
day. Several meteors per hour can usually be seen on any given A burst of Perseid meteors.
night. Sometimes the number increases dramatically - these
events are termed meteor showers. Some occur annually or at regular intervals as the Earth
passes through the trail of dusty debris left by a comet. Meteor showers are usually named
after a star or constellation that is close to where the meteors appear in the sky. Perhaps the
most famous are the Perseids, which peak around 12 August every year. Every Perseid meteor
is a tiny piece of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which swings by the Sun every 135 years. Other
meteor showers and their associated comets are the Leonids (Tempel-Tuttle), the Aquarids
and Orionids (Halley), and the Taurids (Encke). Most comet dust in meteor showers burns up
in the atmosphere before reaching the ground; some dust is captured by high-altitude aircraft
and analyzed in NASA laboratories.

Chunks of rock and metal from asteroids and other planetary bodies that survive their
journey through the atmosphere and fall to the ground are called meteorites. Most meteorites
found on Earth are pebble to fist size, but some are larger than a building. Early Earth
experienced many large meteorite impacts that caused extensive destruction.
One of the most intact impact craters is the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona,
about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) across, formed by the impact of a piece of iron-nickel metal
approximately 50 meters (164 feet) in diameter. It is only 50,000 years old and so well
preserved that it has been used to study impact processes. Since this feature was recognized
as an impact crater in the 1920s, about 170 impact craters have been identified on Earth.
A very large asteroid impact 65 million years ago, which created the 300-kilometerwide (180-mile-wide) Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, is thought to have
contributed to the extinction of about 75 percent of marine and land animals on Earth at the
time, including the dinosaurs.
Well-documented stories of meteorite-caused injury or death are rare. In the first
known case of an extraterrestrial object to have injured a human being in the U.S., Ann
Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was severely bruised by a 3.6-kilogram (8-pound) stony
meteorite that crashed through her roof in November 1954.
Meteorites may resemble Earth rocks, but they usually have a burned exterior. This
fusion crust is formed as the meteorite is melted by friction as it passes through the
atmosphere. There are three major types of meteorites: the "irons," the "stones," and the
stony-irons. Although the majority of meteorites that fall to Earth are stony, more of the
meteorites that are discovered long after they fall are irons - these heavy objects are easier to
distinguish from Earth rocks than stony meteorites. Meteorites also fall on other solar system
bodies. Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity found the first meteorite of any type on another
planet when it discovered an iron-nickel meteorite about the size of a basketball on Mars in
2005, and then found a much larger and heavier iron-nickel meteorite in 2009 in the same
region. In all, Opportunity has discovered six meteorites during its travels on Mars.
More than 50,000 meteorites have been found on Earth. Of these, 99.8 percent come
from asteroids. Evidence for an asteroid origin includes orbits calculated from photographic
observations of meteorite falls projected back to the asteroid belt; spectra of several classes of
meteorites match those of some asteroid classes; and they are very old, 4.5 to 4.6 billion
years. However, we can only match one group of meteorites to a specific asteroid - the
eucrite, diogenite, and howardite igneous meteorites come from the third-largest asteroid,
Vesta. Asteroids and the meteorites that fall to Earth are not pieces of a planet that broke
apart, but instead are the original diverse materials from which the planets formed. The study
of meteorites tells us much about the earliest conditions and processes during the formation
and earliest history of the solar system, such as the age and composition of solids, the nature
of the organic matter, the temperatures achieved at the surface and interiors of asteroids, and
the degree to which materials were shocked by impacts.
The remaining 0.2 percent of meteorites is split roughly equally between meteorites
from Mars and the moon. The over 60 known martian meteorites were blasted off Mars by
meteoroid impacts. All are igneous rocks crystallized from magma. The rocks are very much
like Earth rocks with some distinctive compositions that indicate martian origin. The nearly
80 lunar meteorites are similar in mineralogy and composition to Apollo mission moon rocks,

but distinct enough to show that they have come from other parts of the moon. Studies of
lunar and martian meteorites complement studies of Apollo Moon rocks and the robotic
exploration of Mars.
Significant Dates

4.55 billion years ago: Formation age of most meteorites, taken to be the age of the
solar system.

65 million years ago: Chicxulub impact leads to the death of 75 percent of the
animals on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

50,000 years: Age of Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona.

1478 BCE: First recorded observation of meteors.

1794: Ernst Friedrich Chladni publishes the first book on meteorites, in which he
proposes that they have an extraterrestrial origin.

1908: (Tunguska), 1947 (Sikote Alin), 1969 (Allende and Murchison), 1976 (Jilin) Important 20th-century meteorite falls.

1969: Discovery of meteorites in a small area of Antarctica leads to annual

expeditions by U.S. and Japanese teams.

1982-1983: Meteorites from the moon and Mars are identified in Antarctic
collections.

1996: A team of NASA scientists suggests that martian mete-orite ALH84001 may
contain evidence of microfossils from Mars, a still-controversial claim.

2005: NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity finds a basketball-size ironnickel meteorite on Mars.

2009 : Opportunity finds another iron-nickel meteorite on Mars.