Space Objects and Comets

Icy chunks of water and dust that originate in the outer Solar System. When they come near the Sun they vapourise, developing a bright tail. REASONS TO VISIT See the frozen relics of the formation of the Solar System Visit the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud, where these icy chunks wander through outer space Examine their composition to see if comets brought life to Earth

Giant Rotating Space Craft using a speed lever to reach (theoretical) light speed. Buildable with todays technique.

The stones that fell to earth...meteorites. Genuine stones of meteoric origin...Moldavite, Tektite, Gibeon Meteorites. We also have minerals and fossils from around the world.

An announcement was made on March 15 of the discovery of the furthest object so far seen in our solar system. The object, named Sedna, is estimated to be 1300 to 1800 km in diameter (Pluto is 2400 km in diameter). For more information, see the NASA Press Release

Comets can be spectacular objects seen in the night-time sky. They have been associated by the superstitious with disasters and other notable historical events.

For most of recorded history, comets have played a unique role in culture and science. However, it was really only about 500 years ago that the serious, methodological, standardized observation of comets began, leading slowly to our view of comets as planetary 'worlds' orbiting the sun. After centuries of building our picture of comets through distant observations from Earth, we finally got close-up pictures of cometary nuclei with spacecraft in 1986 (comet 1P/Halley) and in 2001 (comet 19/P Borrelly).

During the last few years it has become widely recognized that from time to time the Earth is hit by large objects from space. These are now known to be responsible for what are called 'extinction events' when most of the existing life forms went extinct suddenly. The Earth is traveling through space at quite high speed around the Sun and the Sun is orbiting the centre of the galaxy.

Asteroids Asteroids are small, rocky objects which orbit the Sun along with all the other planets. They are also commonly called minor planets (and rarely as planetoids) because they are considerably smaller than ordinary planets. Astronomers estimate that there are more than 100,000 asteroids in our solar system although only about 8000 have been cataloged as of mid-1997.

Introduction to Comets: Comets have always captured the imaginations of humans. Probably because of their unexpected appearances, huge apparent sizes on the sky, mysterious and rapid motions about the sky, and, finally, their equally mysterious disappearances, civilizations have been awed and frequently terrified by comets. The history of our understanding of these fascinating objects is quite interesting. Somewhat surprisingly, in the last few decades, comets have taken on new meaning and increased significance in modern astronomy as well.

JPL's solar system dynamics WWW site provides information related to all known bodies in orbit around the sun. This site is maintained by the Solar System Dynamics Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.