Tuesday, September 06, 2005
"It's not your father's solar system" - says SpaceDaily - Until now, comets have been dubbed "dirty snowballs", but it might be appropriate to call them "snowy dirtballs" given the extraordinary dominance of ultrafine dust.
Not only that, but the deep impact probe - a few hundred kilograms of impactor - liberated over 5000 tons of water from Comet Tempel1 - in case you weren't paying attention, that's more water in solar orbit than a shuttle could lift in a thousand missions, more water than is known to exist on Mars or the moon - frozen there - and on every comet and probably most asteroids, waiting for us, in a fine dust that would be easy to convert to clean, usable water....
Now if we can only summon the international nerve to get our materials for space development from space - more than just the 100 milligrams that Hayabusa is returning!
- "[Tempel1 was] like a brittle sponge... which crumbles in your hand," said Uwe Keller, a scientist with the European Space Agency's comet-chasing probe Rosetta ... and the solar system seems likely to be dominated by a huge population of rock and ice planets ranging from dwarf sizes like Pluto to perhaps super-Earth's. Most of these new worlds are expected to follow elliptical, highly-inclined orbits, like those of Pluto, Quaoar, Sedna, and UB313.
A revolutionary aspect of this emerging, new paradigm is the dawning realization that the long-known eight rocky and giant planets, Mercury through Neptune, now seem to be the misfits.
Further still, of all the planets now expected to orbit within our sun Sol's grasp, most orbit between ten and a thousand times farther than do any of the planets we were taught about in school.
Not only that, but the deep impact probe - a few hundred kilograms of impactor - liberated over 5000 tons of water from Comet Tempel1 - in case you weren't paying attention, that's more water in solar orbit than a shuttle could lift in a thousand missions, more water than is known to exist on Mars or the moon - frozen there - and on every comet and probably most asteroids, waiting for us, in a fine dust that would be easy to convert to clean, usable water....
Now if we can only summon the international nerve to get our materials for space development from space - more than just the 100 milligrams that Hayabusa is returning!
Labels: comets, deep impact
¶ 9:33 PM
