Impacts from Space: A Journey Through Celestial Collisions
Explore the fascinating world of space rocks and their impacts on our solar system. From the asteroid belt to Jupiter's recent collisions, witness the remnants of cosmic encounters on moons, planets, and even Earth itself. Discover the history of impacts, including the catastrophic event that led to the extinction of dinosaurs, offering a glimpse into the dynamic nature of our cosmic neighborhood.
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Presentation Transcript
Space Rocks Impacts of our smallest neighbors 1
Asteroid Belt Asteroid Belt 2
Primitive Solar System The four inner planets formed, but Jupiter s huge gravity caused chaos in the region past Mars. No big planet ever formed there 3
Craters in the Inner Solar System Mars s Southern Highlands Mercury 4
Impacts on Moons Mars s tiny moon Phobos Mimas, a moon of Saturn 5
Lunar Cratering Our Moon shows a history of impacts Most of these occurred long ago 6
The Asteroid Belt is Sparse On average, there are more than 1 million km between asteroids 8
Dynamic Collisions Do Occur And the effects are seen throughout the Solar System 9
Jupiter Shows Recent Impacts The world watched as a comet collided with Jupiter in 1994 Possibly not as rare as we thought. Other collisions have occurred since, like this one in 2009 10
More than 170 Impact Craters on Earth 11
Earth Erases History of Impacts Barringer Crater, Arizona Roter Kamm, Namibia 12 Wolf Creek, Australia
Recent Earth Impacts 2008 TC3- first celestial object tracked by astronomers before entering Earth s atmosphere Tunguska in Russia 1909 14
Meteorites Chunks of asteroids sometimes make it through the atmosphere to the ground These are time capsules telling us about how matter came together in the early Solar System 15
Future Impacts Meteoroids smaller than a house will explode in our atmosphere 5-10 meter objects hit about once a year Larger objects are rare but devastating We don t know when the next big impact will happen, but it will eventually 16
Can we Stop an Impact? Our best chance of avoiding an impact is having advance notice of a threat 17
NASAs WISE Mission Using Infrared technology to see dark asteroids WISE finds asteroids - including some seen for the first time 100,000s of Main Belt Asteroids 100s of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) 18
The Challenge Could be Ours If we dofind an asteroid headed for Earth 19
