# data[].attributes.body
username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/jupiter/

# data[].attributes.body
username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/mars/

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username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/neptune/

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username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/saturn/

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username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/uranus/

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username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/mercury/

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username: moretonbay
password: college
https://www.brainpop.com/science/space/venus/

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mercury/overview/

# data[].attributes.body
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus/overview/

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mars/overview/#:~:text=Mars%20is%20one%20of%20the,one%20lander%20on%20the%20surface.&text=NASA%20launched%20the%20next%2Dgeneration,Mars%20on%20July%2030%2C2020.

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/jupiter/overview/

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/saturn/overview/

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Mercury'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Venus'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Mars'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Jupiter'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Saturn'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Neptune'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Search 'Uranus'
Space Science Series
Author: Betsy Rathburn

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signinTitle Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signinTitle Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signinTitle Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signinTitle Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
Title Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signinTitle Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.biguniverse.com/signin
Title Journeys to Outer Space
Mission: Space Science
Author: Megan Kopp

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.space.com/26894-living-on-mercury-explained-infographic.html

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https://www.space.com/28357-how-to-live-on-venus.html

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https://oxplore.org/question-detail/could-we-live-on-another-planet#1672

Scroll down

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https://www.space.com/28705-how-to-live-on-europa.html

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https://www.space.com/28786-living-on-saturn-moons-titan-enceladus.html

and

https://thetechseer.com/can-humans-live-on-saturn/#:~:text=At%20least%2C%20you%20wouldn't,that%20we%20know%20of%2C%20anyway.&text=Saturn%20doesn't%20have%20any%20of%20that.

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Firm no- use the facts and statistics of the planet to inform this justification. What about one of Neptune's moons though?
https://www.space.com/28913-how-to-live-on-neptune-triton.html

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https://astronimate.com/article/live-uranus/

What about one of its moons?
https://www.space.com/28827-living-on-uranus-moons-titania-miranda.html

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K-12 Digital Literacy Solution — Big Universe

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K-12 digital literacy solution with thousands of leveled eBooks for all subjects, available 24/7, on any device.

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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/519262/facts-about-dwarf-planet-makemake

Use for MAKEMAKE stuff.
Very useful. Very.

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Within the Kuiper Belt-that ring of ices and volatile material beyond the orbit of Neptune-are all but one of the known dwarf planets in the solar system. Pluto is the largest of that class of planet, with Eris a close second. Next on that list is the plucky Makemake, a relatively reflective, distant, and dynamic world. From a distance of 4.26 billion miles, much about Makemake remains a mystery, though scientists are chipping away at the unknowns. Here are a few things they know-but you might not-about Makemake.

1. MAKEMAKE IS ONLY THREE TIMES AS LONG AS THE GRAND CANYON.

Makemake's orbit is a half-billion miles farther from the Sun than Pluto's. One day on the distant dwarf lasts nearly as long as ours does-22.5 hours-but the small world is in no rush to circle our star: One Makemakean year is 305 Earth years long. With a diameter of about 880 miles, the dwarf planet is about two-thirds the size of Pluto-and about three times the size of the 277-mile-long Grand Canyon-making it the 25th largest object in the solar system. That might not seem very impressive until you consider that there are hundreds of thousands of objects orbiting the Sun.

2. IT'S IMPRESSIVELY BRIGHT.

Despite being smaller than Pluto, Makemake is the second brightest object in the Kuiper Belt. Its reflective surface is a result of an abundance of methane and ethane ice present there; half-inch pellets of frozen methane may riddle its frigid surface. It's likely a reddish-brown hue, though its distance makes it hard to tell for sure.

3. IT WAS CALLED "EASTERBUNNY" ...

Mike Brown of Caltech discovered Makemake a few days after Easter in 2005. (Brown also discovered the dwarf planets Eris and Haumea.) Before it received its formal name, Brown's team called it "Easterbunny." To other astronomers, its provisional name was "2005 FY9."

4. ... BEFORE IT WAS OFFICIALLY NAMED AFTER AN EASTER ISLAND GOD.

In 2008, Easterbunny/2005 FY9 was designated a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). When deciding what name to submit to the IAU, the proximal holiday led Brown to its namesake island (itself first visited by a European around Easter 1722), which led Brown to its people and their religious heritage. Makemake is the creator god of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island.

5. MAKEMAKE IS PARTIALLY TO BLAME FOR PLUTO'S DEMOTION TO DWARF PLANET.

The discovery of Makemake and, just a few months before, Eris-which is larger than Pluto -forced astronomers to reconsider what, exactly, makes a planet a planet. A planet has to orbit the Sun, have enough mass that its gravity forces it into a round shape, and clear its immediate space neighborhood of other objects. Eris, Makemake, Pluto, and Haumea fail to meet all three criteria in one way or another. (Pluto's downfall: It doesn't clear its neighborhood.) After fierce debate among astronomers around the world, the IAU created the new category of "dwarf planet" for these objects-including Pluto. (Thanks, Makemake.)

6. MAKEMAKE'S SURFACE IS VOLATILE.

Makemake is no mere round rock in space. In many ways, it's a sibling of Pluto. Its surface, for example, is dominated by methane, a hyper-volatile compound that is also found on Pluto's surface. ("Volatile" means it reacts to changes in temperature.) "The processes on Pluto are driven by the movement of volatiles around the surface as temperatures change," says Alex Parker, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "If a world has a volatile-dominated surface-like Makemake does-it probably has dynamic processes on it similar to Pluto."

7. ITS MOON WAS ONLY RECENTLY DISCOVERED.

In the illustration above, Makemake has no moon. That's because it was only discovered in 2016 by Parker [ PDF], who spotted it in data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope. "It was actually a very obvious satellite," he tells Mental Floss. "I didn't have to do too much digging into the data to get it to pop out; it just sort of stood out clear as day."

He continues: "As soon as I found it, I was also crestfallen, because I was sure other people who had done the preliminary analysis of the data would have almost certainly seen it-and that I would have been late to the party. My first question to the principal investigator of the program was, 'Hey, have you seen the moon in the Makemake data?' And I was sure the answer was going to be, 'Yes.' But it was, 'There's a moon in the Makemake data?' It was super exciting realizing that thing I was sure other people had spotted hadn't been and that I was the first to see it."

The moon's current official designation is S/2015 (136472), and it's nicknamed MK 2. More than 1300 times fainter than Makemake, it's estimated to be a mere 100 miles wide.

8. ASTRONOMERS ARE TRYING TO MAP MAKEMAKE WITH ITS MOON.

Makemake's moon is more than a celestial feature; it's a tool for scientists. As the 105-mile-wide object (nearly twice as long as the Panama Canal) and its planet pass in front of one another, astronomers can use the changes in brightness to map the Makemakean surface. "Just like we had preliminary maps of Pluto before we got there, we can actually use the moon as it passes in front of Makemake as a tool to map it," says Parker.

Specifically, as one object crosses the other, parts of the obscured object can be isolated. Astronomers can then derive the brightness of just the isolated part of the body (rather the whole body at once). Darker areas and lighter areas can then be mapped to the object, and models can help determine whether scientists are seeing terrain features, for example. They're not going to be naming mountains with this technique, but they can find interesting areas worth further study and modeling.

"There are many ways you can think of Makemake as a sort of Pluto prior to the New Horizons exploration. We are just starting to get glimpses of what it looks like," Parker says. "It could be this dynamic and active world, and I think that's exciting."

9. MUCH OF MAKEMAKE REMAINS MYSTERIOUS.

Scientists aren't sure how Makemake's day-night cycle influences its landforms and surface processes (which include things like geology or interactions between the atmosphere-if it has one-and the surface). The history and origin of its moon are also unknown, and raise other interesting questions for scientists. Theorists who work on planetary formation, and astronomers who study the motions of celestial objects, are revising their models to account for why moons are a defining feature for dwarf planets-including the weird ones-when half of the terrestrial planets in the solar system (Mercury and Venus) lack moons.

"Why are moons so ubiquitous among dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt? At this point, every one of the largest objects in the Kuiper Belt [except one] has at least one moon," Parker says. "Some have two. Some have five. And so if you come up with a process for growing these planets [like accretion] ... one of the end states of that process needs to be that they all end up with at least one moon."

10. THERE ARE NO PLANS TO VISIT MAKEMAKE ... YET.

No missions have yet been launched to Makemake, though the New Horizons spacecraft, having completed its reconnaissance of Pluto, has plunged deeper into the Kuiper Belt to study at least one other object there. Back on Earth, planetary scientists are considering frameworks for future Kuiper Belt missions. The development of new propulsion technologies by engineers will enable more science in single expeditions. In the longer term, orbiter missions will return to visited bodies and study them in finer detail. "Given how much variety there is in the Kuiper Belt," Parker says, "it's going to be a pretty exciting time as we shed light on these worlds."

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10 Facts About the Dwarf Planet Makemake

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Within the Kuiper Belt-that ring of ices and volatile material beyond the orbit of Neptune-are all but one of the known dwarf planets in the solar system. Pluto is the largest of that class of planet, with Eris a close second. Next on that list is the plucky Makemake, a relatively reflective, distant, and dynamic world.

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The term for a year on Makemake is a Makemakean year
Wha?

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Venus is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty.

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/overview/?page=0&per_page=40&order=name+asc&search=&condition_1=101%3Aparent_id&condition_2=asteroid%3Abody_type%3Ailike

UWU

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Europa is Jupiter’s moon and also one of its big moons…

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https://www.space.com/16105-asteroid-belt.html
OWO

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Within the main asteroid belt, scattered in orbits around the sun are bits and pieces of rock left over from the dawn of the solar system. Most of these objects, called planetoids or asteroids - meaning "star-like" - orbit between Mars and Jupiter in a grouping known as the main asteroid belt.

The main asteroid belt lies more than two-and-a-half times as far as does from and contains millions of asteroids. Most of these are relatively small, from the size of boulders to a few thousand feet in diameter. But some are significantly larger.

How did the asteroid belt form?

Early in the life of the solar system, dust and rock circling the sun were pulled together by into planets. But not all of the ingredients created new worlds. A region between Mars and Jupiter became the asteroid belt.

Occasionally people wonder whether the belt was made up of the remains of a destroyed planet, or a world that didn't quite get started. However, according to NASA, the total mass of the belt is less than , far too small to weigh in as a planet. Instead, the debris is shepherded by Jupiter, which kept it from coalescing onto other growing planets.

Observations of other planets are helping scientists to better understand the solar system. According to a developing theory known as, in the first 5 million years of the solar system, Jupiter and are thought to have moved inward toward the sun before changing direction and heading back to the outer solar system. Along the way, they would have scattered the original asteroid belt before them, then sent material flying back to refill it.

"In the Grand Tack model, the asteroid belt was purged at a very early stage and the surviving members sample a much larger region of the solar ," John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution for Science wrote in a "Perspectives" piece published online in the journal Science.

Our solar system isn't the only one to boast an asteroid belt. A cloud of dust around a star known as zeta Leporis looks a lot like a young belt. "Zeta Leporis is a relatively young star - approximately the age of our sun when the Earth was forming," Michael Jura said in a. "The system we observed around zeta Leporis is similar to what we think occurred in the early years of our own solar system when planets and asteroids were created." A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Jura has since passed away.

Other also contain signs of asteroid belts, suggesting that may be common.

At the same time, studies of white dwarfs, sun-like stars at the end of their lifetimes, show signatures of rocky material falling onto their surface that suggest such belts are common around dying systems.

(Image credit: ISAS/JAXA)

Belt composition

Most of the asteroids in the main belt are made of rock and stone, but a small portion of them contain iron and nickel metals. The remaining asteroids are made up of a mix of these, along with carbon-rich materials. Some of the more distant asteroids tend to contain more ices. Although they aren't large enough to maintain an atmosphere, but there is evidence that some asteroids contain water.

Some asteroids are large, solid bodies - there are more than 16 in the belt with a diameter greater than 150 miles (240 km). The largest asteroids, Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea, are 250 miles (400 km) long and bigger. The region also contains the dwarf planet Ceres. At 590 miles (950 km) in diameter, or about a quarter of the size of our moon, Ceres is round yet is considered too small to be a full-fledged planet. However, it makes up approximately a third of the mass of the asteroid belt.

Other asteroids are piles of rubble held together by gravity. Most asteroids aren't quite massive enough to have achieved a spherical shape and instead are irregular, often resembling a lumpy potato. The asteroid 216 Kleopatra resembles a dog bone.

Asteroids are classified into several types based on their chemical composition and their reflectivity, or albedo.

C-type asteroids make up more than 75 percent of known asteroids. The "C" stands for carbon, and the surfaces of these extremely dark asteroids are almost coal-black. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites on Earth have a similar composition, and are thought to be pieces smashed off of the larger asteroids. While C-type asteroids dominate in the belt, according to the European Space Agency, they make up only about 40 percent of the asteroids closer to the sun. These include subgroups of B-type, F-type, and G-types.

S-type asteroids are the second most common type, making up about 17 percent of known asteroids. They dominate the inner asteroid belt, becoming rarer farther out. They are brighter and have metallic nickel-iron mixed with iron- and magnesium-silicates. The "S" stands for silicaceous.

M-type asteroids ("M" for metallic) are the last major type. These asteroids are fairly bright and most of them are composed of pure nickel-iron. They tend to be found in the middle region of the asteroid belt.

The remaining rare types of asteroids are A-type, D-type, E-type, P-type, Q-type, and R-type.

In 2007, launched a mission, Dawn, to visit Ceres and Vesta. Dawn reached Vesta in 2011 and remained there for over a year before traveling on to reach Ceres in 2015. It will remain in orbit around the dwarf planet until the end of its mission.

While most of the asteroid belt is made up of rocky objects, Ceres is an icy body. Hints of organic material spotted by Dawn suggest that it may have formed farther out in the solar system before landing in the belt. While the organics have only been seen on the surface, that doesn't mean more material might lie on the dwarf planet.

"We cannot exclude that there are other locations rich in organics not sampled by the survey, or below the detection limit," Maria Cristina De Sanctis, of the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Space Planetology in Rome, told Space.com by email.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech )

Asteroid mining

Asteroids have more than enough gold, plus other precious metals, to provide a few lifetimes' worth of fortunes. But there are plenty of other reasons asteroids are valuable. But how do we get these metals from these faraway asteroids? Perhaps the best way is to bring the rocks to Earth. Most of the metals we use in our everyday lives are buried deep within the Earth. And we mean deep: when our young planet was still molten, almost all of the heavy metals sank to the core, which is pretty hard to get to. The accessible veins of gold, zinc, platinum and other valuable metals instead came from later asteroid impacts on Earth's surface.

Those asteroids are the fragmented remains of almost-planets, but they contain all the same mixtures of elements as their larger planetary cousins - and you don't have to dig down into their cores to get it. But the main problem with asteroids is that they are far away. To launch from Earth's surface and go into orbit, a rocket needs to change its velocity from zero to eight kilometres (five miles) per second.

To rendezvous with an average asteroid, the rocket has to change its velocity by another 5.5 kilometres (3.4 miles) per second. That requires almost as much fuel as the launch itself, which the rocket would have to carry as dead weight, adding to the already-high cost of trying to set up a remote mining operation in the first place. And once the asteroid was mined, asteroid prospectors would be faced with a difficult choice: They could try to refine the ore right there on the asteroid, which would entail setting up an entire refining facility, or ship the raw ore back to Earth, with all the waste that would involve.

Building a belt

The main belt lies between Mars and Jupiter, roughly two to four times the Earth-sun distance, and spans a region about 140 million miles across. Objects in the belt are divided into eight subgroups named after the main asteroids in each group. These groups are the Hungarias, Floras, Phocaea, Koronis, Eos, Themis, Cybeles and Hildas.

Although Hollywood often displays ships making close calls through asteroid belts, the trip is generally uneventful. A number of spacecraft have safely traveled through the asteroid belt without incident, including NASA's New Horizons mission to .

"Fortunately, the asteroid belt is so huge that, despite its large population of small bodies, the chance of running into one is almost vanishingly small - far less than one in a billion," wrote New Horizons principle investigator. "If you want to come close enough to an asteroid to make detailed studies of it, you have to aim for one."

Within the asteroid belt are relatively empty regions known as Kirkwood gaps. These gaps correspond to orbital resonances with Jupiter. The 's gravitational pull keeps these regions far emptier than the rest of the belt. In other resonances, the asteroids can be more concentrated.

(Image credit: Getty )

Discovery of the asteroid belt

Johann Titius, an 18th-century German astronomer, noted a mathematical pattern in the layout of the planets and used it to predict the existence of one between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers scoured the heavens in search of this missing body. In 1800, 25 astronomers formed a group known as the Celestial Police, each searching 15 degrees of the for the missing planet. But the discovery of the first body in this region came from a nonmember, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi: he named it Ceres. A second body, Pallas, was found a little over a year later.

For some time, both of these objects were referred to as planets. But the discovery rate of these objects increased, and by the beginning of the 19th century, more than 100 had been found. Scientists quickly realized that these were too small to be considered planets, and they began to call them asteroids.

Additional resources

You can read more about asteroids and the updated current asteroid count at NASA's Solar System Exploration asteroid page. Additionally you can learn more about the formation of the main asteroid belt in this article by Cosmos Magazine.

Bibliography

" Asteroids". NASA Solar System Exploration (2021).

" The Grand Tack". Southwest Research Institute.

" Forming Terrestrial Planets". Science (2014).

" UCLA Astronomers Identify Evidence Of Asteroid Belt Around Nearby Star: Findings Indicate Potential For Planet Or Asteroid Formation". University of California (2001).

" Asteroids: Structure and composition of asteroids". European Space Agency (2022).

" SwRI Scientist Studies Geology of Ceres to Understand Origin of Organics". Southwest Research Institution (2017).

" New Horizons Crosses The Asteroid Belt". Space Daily (2006).

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The main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, is where most asteroids orbit.

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Overview The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet’s wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years. The Moon was likel…

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Yet to be directly observed, the Oort cloud is a spherical distribution of icy bodies presumed to exist in the far reaches of the Solar System. It was first postulated in 1950 by Jan Hendrik Oort after he noted that observed comets had the following in common:

1. Their orbits indicated that they did not originate in interstellar space,

2. They came from all directions - there was no preferred angle of orbital inclination,

3. Their aphelia tended to group at about 50,000 AU.

Based on these observations, and taking into account the number of visible comets and the frequency with which they appeared, Oort concluded that billions of potential cometary nuclei must exist in a spherical shell surrounding the Solar System. Then, given their distance from the Sun, gravitational perturbations from objects outside the Solar System could knock these nuclei into plunging orbits around the Sun resulting in the observed comets.

These days, the (still hypothetical) Oort cloud is generally acknowledged as the origin of long-period comets ( short-period comets appear to originate in the Kuiper Belt). It is thought to extend from about 20,000 to 100,000 AU, with the number of objects peaking around 44,000 AU. At these distances, gravitational perturbations from passing stars or molecular clouds, or tidal forces from the disk and bulge of the Milky Way can be sufficient to dislodge an object from the Oort cloud and start it on a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun.

Recent work on the model for the Oort cloud, and the discovery in 2004 of the planet-like object, Sedna, have suggested that the Oort cloud could have an inner extension that is more concentrated in the plane of the ecliptic and ultimately merges with the Kuiper Belt. Sedna was discovered beyond the sharply defined outer edge of the classical Kuiper Belt and close to its perihelion distance of 76 AU. This means it cannot be a Kuiper Belt Object. At the same time, however, its 10,000 year orbit takes it out to only around 990 AU at aphelion which is well inside the proposed inner edge of the Oort cloud. Hence it cannot be a classical Oort cloud object. It could, however, be a member of an 'inner Oort cloud', a population of bodies trapped between the Kuiper Belt and classical Oort cloud.

Their large distances from the Sun indicate that the objects in the Oort cloud could not have formed in situ, since the material in the solar nebula would have been too sparse to condense. They most likely formed near the gas giant planets and were ejected into the Oort cloud through gravitational interactions with these much larger bodies. This would also account for the different compositions of long-period comets, as we would expect those that formed close to Jupiter to have a different composition to those that formed closer to Neptune.

Although the numbers vary widely, Oort's estimate that the Oort cloud contains billions of objects remains valid, and even numbers in the trillions have been suggested. Even so, the amount of material contained in the Oort cloud is thought to be fairly small (of the order of tens of Earth masses) since the majority of the objects are expected to be small (measured cometary nuclei have diameters of ~20 km or less) and the distances between them on the order of tens of millions of kilometres.

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Yet to be directly observed, the Oort cloud is a spherical distribution of icy bodies presumed to exist in the far reaches of the Solar System.

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There could be life on Europa
How: there is an ocean beneath the surface (used as water) and a bit of oxygen

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Overview | Europa - NASAg Solar System Exploration

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Overview | Europa - NASA Solar System Exploration

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Scientists are almost certain that hidden beneath the icy surface of Europa is a salty-water ocean thought to contain twice as much water as Earth's oceans combined. Europa may be the most promising place in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth.

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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/ceres/in-depth/

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Introduction

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801. When NASA's Dawn arrived in 2015, Ceres became the first dwarf planet to receive a visit from a spacecraft.

Called an asteroid for many years, Ceres is so much bigger and so different from its rocky neighbors that scientists classified it as a dwarf planet in 2006. Even though Ceres comprises 25% of the asteroid belt's total mass, Pluto is still 14 times more massive.

Namesake

Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of corn and harvests. The word cereal comes from the same name.

Potential for Life

Potential for Life

Ceres is one of the few places in our solar system where scientists would like to search for possible signs of life. Ceres has something a lot of other planets don't: water. Here on Earth, water is essential for life, so it's possible that with this ingredient and a few other conditions met, life possibly could exist there. If anything does live on Ceres, it's likely to be very small microbes similar to bacteria. If Ceres does not have living things today, there may be signs it harbored life in the past.

Size and Distance

Size and Distance

With a radius of 296 miles (476 kilometers), Ceres is 1/13 the radius of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, Ceres would be about as big as a poppy seed.

From an average distance of 257 million miles (413 million kilometers), Ceres is 2.8 astronomical units away from the Sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 22 minutes to travel from the Sun to Ceres.

Orbit and Rotation

Orbit and Rotation

Ceres takes 1,682 Earth days, or 4.6 Earth years, to make one trip around the Sun. As Ceres orbits the Sun, it completes one rotation every 9 hours, making its day length one of the shortest in the solar system.

Ceres' axis of rotation is tilted just 4 degrees with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. That means it spins nearly perfectly upright and doesn't experience seasons like other more tilted planets do.

Moons

Ceres does not have any moons.

Rings

Ceres does not have any rings.

Formation

Ceres formed along with the rest of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become a small dwarf planet. Scientists describe Ceres as an "embryonic planet," which means it started to form but didn't quite finish. Nearby Jupiter's strong gravity prevented it from becoming a fully formed planet. About 4 billion years ago, Ceres settled into its current location among the leftover pieces of planetary formation in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Structure

Ceres is more similar to the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) than its asteroid neighbors, but it is much less dense. One of the similarities is a layered interior, but Ceres' layers aren't as clearly defined. Ceres probably has a solid core and a mantle made of water ice. In fact, Ceres could be composed of as much as 25 percent water. If that is correct, Ceres has more water than Earth does. Ceres' crust is rocky and dusty with large salt deposits. The salts on Ceres aren't like table salt (sodium chloride), but instead are made of different minerals like magnesium sulfate.

Surface

Ceres is covered in countless small, young craters, but none are larger than 175 miles (280 kilometers) in diameter. This is surprising, given that the dwarf planet must have been hit by numerous large asteroids during its 4.5 billion-year lifetime.

The lack of craters might be due to layers of ice just below the surface. The surface features could smooth out over time if ice or another lower-density material, such as salt, is just below the surface. It's also possible that past hydrothermal activity, such as ice volcanoes, erased some large craters.

Within some of Ceres' craters, there are regions that are always in shadow. It's possible that without direct sunlight, these "cold traps" could have water ice in them for long periods of time.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere

Ceres has a very thin atmosphere, and there is evidence it contains water vapor. The vapor may be produced by ice volcanoes or by ice near the surface sublimating (transforming from solid to gas).

Magnetosphere

Magnetosphere

Scientists don't think Ceres has a magnetosphere.

Resources

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In Depth | Ceres - NASA Solar System Exploration

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Introduction Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801.

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NASA is finally headed back to Venus. On June 2, 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency had selected two winners of its latest Discovery class spacecraft mission competition, and both are headed to the second planet from the Sun.

I'm a planetary scientist and a self-confessed Venus evangelist, and here's why I'm so excited that humanity is going back to Venus.

This is the first time since the Magellan mission in 1989 that NASA has committed to sending spacecraft to study the shrouded planet just next door. With the data these two Venus missions - called VERITAS and DAVINCI+ - will collect, planetary scientists can start tackling one of the biggest mysteries in the solar system: Why is Venus, a planet almost the same size, density and age of Earth, so very different from the world humanity calls home?

An Earth gone wrong?

Venus is a rocky planet about the same size as Earth, but despite these similarities, it is a brutal place. Although only a little closer to the Sun than Earth, a runaway greenhouse effect means that it's extremely hot at the surface - about 870 F (465 C), roughly the temperature of a self-cleaning oven. The pressure at the surface is a crushing 90 times the pressure at sea level on Earth. And to top it off, there are sulfuric acid clouds covering the entire planet that corrode anything passing through them.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Venus is that it may have once looked a lot like Earth. Recent climate models suggest that in the past the planet could have had liquid water oceans and a mild climate. It may have been habitable for as long as 3 billion years before succumbing to some sort of climate catastrophe that triggered the runaway greenhouse. The goal of these two new missions to Venus is to try to determine if Venus really was Earth's twin, why it changed and whether, in general, large rocky planets become habitable oases like Earth... or scorched wastelands like Venus.

Fresh eyes on Venus

What might come as a surprise is that in the 1960s and 1970s Venus was the central focus of space exploration like Mars is today. The U.S. and Soviet Union sent more than 30 spacecraft in total to the second planet from the Sun. But since 1989, only two missions have gone to Venus, and both were focused on studying the atmosphere - the European Space Agency's Venus Express and Japan's Akatsuki.

In contrast, the VERITAS and DAVINCI+ missions will take a holistic view by exploring the geological and climatological history of Venus as a whole, in two very different but complementary ways.

The thick, global layer of sulfuric acid clouds covering Venus make it almost impossible to see the surface with normal cameras. That's why the VERITAS orbiter - short for "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy" - will carry a powerful radar system. This radar can peer through the clouds and gather images and topographic data up to 10 times higher-resolution than any previous mission to Venus. This will allow scientists to look for clues about Venus' earlier climate that may be preserved in rock formations on the surface and might also answer whether the planet is geologically active today. And, finally, this exciting mission will use a special, infrared camera to peer through the atmosphere at very specific wavelengths to take the first global measurements of what Venus' rocks are made of - something scientists know very little about.

VERITAS' stablemate is DAVINCI+, or "Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging." The DAVINCI+ mission also involves an orbiter, but the real star of the show will be the meter-wide atmospheric probe. The probe will drop into Venus' atmosphere and free-fall through the thick clouds for about an hour before reaching the surface.

On the way down, it will take samples of the atmosphere, specifically measuring a variety of gases including argon, krypton and xenon. Different climate histories for Venus would lead to different ratios of these noble gases in the atmosphere - and so by analyzing these ratios, scientists will be able to work out how much water the planet formed with, and even how much water it has lost over the past 4.5 billion years.

But that's not all the probe will do. Just before impacting crash landing into an area called Alpha Regio that has some of the oldest rocks on the planet, the probe will take infrared images of the surface as it comes into view through the gloom of the lower atmosphere. Those images will be the first ever taken from above the surface but below the cloud deck, showing planetary scientists Venus as never before.

Now is the time to go back to Venus

I have argued before for returning to Venus, so to say I'm enthusiastic about these missions is an understatement. Venus may hold the key to understanding the past - and possibly the future - of Earth. As astronomers discover more and more Earth-size worlds around other stars, they need to understand whether the outcome we see on Earth - blue skies, water oceans and even a thriving biosphere - is the norm, or if the hellish, barren wastelands of Venus are the rule.

[ Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation's newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Several decades of sustained Mars exploration have shown that each mission answers earlier questions and also raises new ones. I don't know what surprises VERITAS and DAVINCI+, scheduled to launch in the late 2020s, will uncover at Venus, but I do know they'll discover aspects of the planet that no one had ever imagined. Scientists and mission teams across the world have worked hard to realize a " Decade of Venus," and it's starting to pay off. In fact, only a week after NASA's announcement, the European Space Agency declared its plans for a Venus mission, too. With these new missions, it's my guess - my hope - that we're at the start of a new, golden age of Venus exploration.

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NASA is returning to Venus to learn how it became a hot poisonous wasteland - and whether the planet was ever habitable in the past

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NASA is finally headed back to Venus. On June 2, 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that the agency had selected two winners of its latest Discovery class spacecraft mission competition, and both are headed to the second planet from the Sun.

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Venus is the second planet orbiting our Sun in the Solar System. Circling at an average distance of approximately 108 million kilometres (around 67 million miles) from the Sun, it sits between the orbits of Mercury and Earth.

While it takes our planet just under 24 hours to do a complete 360 degree rotation, Venus takes a smidge over 243 Earth days to do the same. In that time it's already travelled completely around the Sun once, a trip that takes just 225 Earth days.

If we define a day by the amount of time between two sunrises, this slow journey means a Venusian day is nearly 117 days long.

Weirder yet, the direction of its rotation is opposite to most planet's, including ours. Exactly why is a mystery. One possibility is that tidal forces from the Sun tugged Venus just the right way for it to slowly brake and reverse its spin.

What would it be like standing on the surface of Venus?

The Venusian atmosphere is dominated by a heavy layer made nearly entirely of carbon dioxide, with a couple percent of nitrogen, and a few other trace gases.

It's so thick, standing on its surface you'd experience a pressure similar to submerging yourself nearly 800 metres deep (about 2,550 feet) in water on Earth.

The generous amount of carbon dioxide also traps a significant amount of incoming heat from the Sun, pushing temperatures to an excess of 460 degrees Celsius (860 Fahrenheit).

At an altitude of around 60 to 80 kilometres (40 to 50 miles), hovers a thick blanket of cloud. While it's entire structure isn't clearly understood, the top-most section is believed to be a mist of sulfuric acid. In Venus' atmosphere, carbon dioxide is also broken down by sunlight into carbon monoxide above the cloud tops.

In 2020, astronomers discovered a significant abundance of the chemical phosphine high in Venus' atmosphere. On Earth, this chemical is produced by both geological and biological processes, but whether it aros from an organic process or a biological one remains unknown.

Structurally speaking, the surface of Venus resembles our own planet in a number of ways. It's a terrestrial (rocky) planet made of silicates and metals, with a radius of 6,052 kilometers (3,760 miles) - just a few hundred kilometres less than Earth's - and a similar density that gives it a gravity roughly 90 percent of our own world's.

The planet's geology is also heavily textured by its history of volcanic activity, yet with marked differences that don't appear to resemble anything found here. Formations resembling vast spider-webs (dubbed arachnoids) sprawl across the landscape in some areas.

Some of these unusual features could boil down to another key difference between our two worlds. Unlike Earth, Venus has no plate tectonics. Without plate boundaries, its geological activity is concentrated differently to our own.

While Venus still appears to be volcanically active and is thought to have a sizable iron core, any dynamo effect produced by currents of molten mineral deep beneath its crust doesn't seem to be powerful enough to give Venus a self-generated magnetic field.

Just why Earth has a magnetic field, while Venus doesn't, is yet another curiosity to solve. One possibility is the collision that gave us a moon - something Venus lacks - churned up our planet's guts in a way that has left us with a swirling mess of magnetising currents.

Could we ever travel to Venus?

While Mars has attracted significant attention in the past, space exploration has seen its fair share of missions to our other neighbour.

Orbiting Venus is one thing. Getting a probe to land on the surface and survive long enough to send back some digital postcards is a challenge plagued by extreme heat, pressure, and corrosive elements.

In 1967, the Soviet probe Venera 4 not only became the first mission to survive a plunge into Venus's clouds, it was the first technology to directly analyse the atmosphere of another world.

Future missions to Venus would have to overcome similar obstacles, potentially relying on more robust ( or even clockwork) technology. The risks could well be worth it to unravel the many remaining mysteries of one of our closest celestial neighbours.
All Explainers are determined by fact checkers to be correct and relevant at the time of publishing. Text and images may be altered, removed, or added to as an editorial decision to keep information current.

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Venus is the second planet orbiting our Sun in the Solar System. Circling at an average distance of approximately 108 million kilometres (around 67 million miles) from the Sun, it sits between the orbits of Mercury and Earth.

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https://www.space.com/51-asteroids-formation-discovery-and-exploration.html

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Asteroids are the rocky remnants of material leftover from the formation of the solar system and its planets approximately 4.6 billion years ago.

The majority of asteroids originate from the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, according to NASA. NASA's current asteroid count is over 1 million.

Asteroids orbit in highly flattened, or "elliptical" circles, often rotating erratically, tumbling and falling through space.

Related: Smashin' asteroids, Hollywood style: could nuking an asteroid save the Earth?

Many large asteroids have one or more small companion moons. An example of this is , a half-mile (780 meters) wide asteroid that is orbited by the moonlet Dimorphos which measures just 525 feet (160 m) across.

Asteroids are also often referred to as "minor planets" and can range in size from the largest known example, , which has a diameter of around 326 miles (525 kilometers), to bodies that are less than 33 feet (10 meters) across.

Vesta recently snatched the "largest asteroid title" from Ceres, which NASA now classifies as a dwarf planet. Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt while Vesta is the second largest.

As well as coming in a range of sizes, asteroids come in a variety of shapes from near spheres to irregular double-lobed peanut-shaped asteroids like Most asteroid surfaces are pitted with impact craters from collisions with other space rocks.

Though a majority of asteroids lurk in the asteroid belt, , the massive gravitational influence of , the solar system's largest planet, can send them hurtling through in random directions, including through the inner solar system and thus towards . But don't worry, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is keeping a watchful eye on near-Earth objects (NEOs), including asteroids, to assess the impact hazard and aid the U.S. government in planning for a response to a possible impact threat.

Asteroid definition

What are asteroids made of?

Before the formation of the planets of the solar system, the infant sun was surrounded by a disk of dust and gas, called a protoplanetary disk. While most of this disk collapsed to form the planets some material was left over.

"Simply put, asteroids are leftovers rocky material from the time of thesolar system formation. They are the initial bricks that built the planets," Fred Jourdan, a planetary scientist at Curtin University told Space.com in an email "So all the material that formed all those asteroids is about 4.55 billion years old."

In the chaotic conditions of the early solar system, this material repeatedly clashed together with small grains clustering to form small rocks, which clustered to form larger rocks and eventually planetesimals  -  bodies that don't grow large enough to form planets. Further collisions shattered apart these planetesimals, with these fragments and rocks forming the asteroids we see today.

"All that happened 4.5 billion years ago but the solar system has remained a very dynamic place since then," Jourdan added. "During the next few billions of years until the present, some asteroids smashed into each other and destroyed each other, and the debris recombined and formed what we call rubble pile asteroids."

This means asteroids can also differ by how solid they are. Some asteroids are one solid monolithic body, while others like are essentially floating rubble piles, made of smaller bodies loosely bound together gravitationally.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

"I would say there are three types of asteroids. The first one is the monolith chondritic asteroid, so that's the real brick of the solar system," Jourdan explained. "These asteroids remained relatively unchanged since their formation. Some of them are rich in silicates, and some of them are rich in carbon with different tales to tell."

The second type is the differentiated asteroids which for a while behaved like they were tiny planets forming a metallic core, a mantle, and a volcanic crust. Jourdan said these asteroids would look layered like an egg if cut from the side, with the best example of this being Vesta, which he calls his "favorite asteroid."

"The last type is the rubble pile asteroids so it's just when asteroids smashed into each other and the fragment that is ejected reassemble together," Jourdan continued. These asteroids are made of boulders, rocks, pebbles, dust, and a lot of void spacing which makes them so resistant to any further impacts. In that regard, rubble piles are a bit like giant space cushions."

Swipe to scroll horizontally

The differences in asteroid composition are related to how far away from the sun the asteroid formed. Proximity to the sun and high temperatures after formation caused asteroids to melt, with iron sinking to the center and forcing basaltic (volcanic) lava to the surface.

Asteroid FAQs answered by an expert

We asked Paul Chodas, the director of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), a few frequently asked questions about asteroids.

How often do asteroids hit Earth?

What's the difference between asteroids, meteorites and comets?

How do we know if a potentially dangerous asteroid is heading our way?

What are Near Earth Objects and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids?

(Image credit: NASA)

Asteroids are also classified by their size and their location in relation to Earth. According to the Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) asteroids estimate the size of asteroids using their brightness or "absolute " and how well they reflect sunlight back into space.

"A NEO is a Near-Earth Object is an asteroid or comet whose orbit brings it into the Earth's region of the Solar System," Chodas said. "Most asteroids are on fairly circular orbits that stay in the asteroid belt between and Jupiter. NEOs are on orbits that bring them closer to the sun and in the general vicinity of Earth."

In terms of their orbits, NASA defines a NEO as coming to distances less than 1.3 AU from Earth, where 1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun. The majority of NEOs are "Near Earth Asteroids" (NEA) and these are divided into three sub-categories.

Athens, are NEAs that cross Earth's orbit with an orbit possessing a semi-major axis smaller than that of the orbit of our planet. They take their name from 2062 Aten. Apollos also cross Earth's orbit, but have a semi-major axis larger than our planet's and take their name from 1862 Apollo. The final group, the Armors, are Earth approaching NEAs with orbits outside our planet's, but inside the orbit of Mars.

There is a further group of asteroids, however. Ones that could potentially pose a threat to Earth.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"A PHO is a Potentially Hazardous Object, which is large enough to be hazardous if it should hit Earth, larger than about 140 meters, or about 500 feet, AND is on an orbit that brings it quite close to Earth's orbit, to within about 5 million miles," Chodas explained. "As the PHO and the Earth orbit the sun, there is a potential for them to come very close to each other, but that doesn't mean that an impact is inevitable any time soon."

NASA currently reports 586 known potentially hazardous asteroids.

Do asteroids hit Earth and how often?

NASA estimates that every year over 100 tons of material falls to Earth from space, but just how much of this material is in the form of asteroids?

Asteroid impacts are less frequent today than they were in the early solar system, especially between 7.8 million and 11.7 million years ago when conditions were far more chaotic.

This early bombardment of our planet by asteroids may have been vital to the development of life on Earth. As Harvard University points out analysis of asteroids indicates they could have been important in seeding water to the planet's surface.

Of course, occasionally Earth is hit by larger and more devastating asteroids. One striking (if you'll excuse the pun) example is found in the Chicxulub region of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mexico, where an asteroid thought to be between 6.2 to 9.3 miles (10 and 15 kilometers) wide struck the Earth slicing a 6.2 mile-wide (10 kilometer-wide) scar into the surface of the planet 6.5 million years ago.
Related: This Asteroid Launcher simulator lets you destroy your hometown - or anywhere else
Known as the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid wiped out 75% of Earth's species, including the dinosaurs, according to the Natural History Museum. Chodas points out that impacts from such large asteroids are rare.

a space rock larger between 25 meters and just over half a mile wide (1 kilometer) would cause local damage if it hits Earth, while an asteroid between around half a mile and a mile (1 and 2 kilometers) could have global ramifications.

"Asteroids large enough to cause a global catastrophe impact Earth [larger than 1 kilometer or 0.62 miles] only once in a million years, and they are of much less concern because we've already discovered 95% of them," Chodas said. "We know that none of them are headed for impact over at least the next century."

The reason we know this is thanks to the impressive tracking efforts of NASA and other space agencies and observatories.

Could we save Earth from an asteroid impact?

To date, only about 40 percent of 460-foot-plus (140-meter-plus) sized asteroids have been found, according to NASA. That means it makes sense to be prepared for such an event. While many concepts exist to divert asteroids, only one has made it to practical testing away from the surface of Earth.

"The Double Asteroid Redirection Test () mission demonstrated NASA's capability to slightly change the trajectory of a small asteroid using a concept called a Kinetic Impactor," Chodas concluded. "With this technique, a spacecraft rams into the target and imparts a small change in its velocity. If an asteroid were headed towards Earth, and we knew about the possibility of collision with many years of warning, and the asteroid was not too large, a spacecraft like DART could be used to divert the asteroid so that it would miss the Earth many years later."

DART reached its target Dimorphos on September 2022, successfully altering the asteroid's orbit. The mission represented the first time humanity has altered the course of a celestial object, but the tiny alteration demonstrates that to successfully deploy such a mission to save Earth, a long advance notice, or "lead time" is needed.

"For planetary defense, it's vital to know what asteroids are made of if we want to attempt to push them away," Jourdan said. "It's not the same pushing a chunk from a differentiated asteroid completely made of metal compared to an asteroid made of rocky rubble. Each type of asteroid would require different techniques, different approaches, and different amounts of energy to push the asteroid away.

"By studying those asteroids and meteorites we can start to think about those questions early, before the time arise when we will need precise and accurate answers to act. Hopefully not too soon, if at all!"

Thus, agencies like CNEOS must continue monitoring the heavens for asteroids tracking their orbits, and projecting them in the future. Not only could this ensure humanity won't experience the same fate as dinosaurs but studying these fossilized remnants from the early solar system could teach us more about the origins of our planet and its neighbors.

Additional resources

The DART mission was humanity's first attempt to redirect an asteroid in preparation for the possibility such an object could one day approach Earth and pose a threat to the planet. Read more about the mission here on NASA's mission page

The CNEOS contains a list of known NEOs about to make a close approach to Earth including their velocities and distances from the planet.

Arguably the most famous asteroid in Earth's history is the one that impacted our planet over 65 million years ago wiping out around 75% of its species including the dinosaurs. You can read more about this asteroid, the Chicxulub impactor in these resources from the Natural History Museum.

Bibliography

NASA Confirms DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid's Motion in Space, NASA,

[https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space]

Asteroids, NASA, [Accessed 02/05/23], [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/in-depth/]

Asteroids, Cosmos Swinburne, [Accessed 02/05/23], [https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/m/main+asteroid+belt]

Origin of water on Earth, Harvard University, [Accessed 02/05/23], [https://courses.seas.harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/EPS281r/Sources/Origin-of-oceans/1-Wikipedia-Origin-of-water-on-Earth.pdf]

Discovery, CNEOS, [Accessed 02/05/23], [https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/]

Vesta, NASA, [Accessed 02/05/23], [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/science/vesta/]

Ceres, NASA, [Acessed 02/05/23], [https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/ceres/overview/]

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Asteroids: Fun Facts and Information About Asteroids

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Asteroids are space rocks that mostly exist between Mars and Jupiter. They are made of material left over from the birth of the solar system.

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The Solar System expanded from a big explosion of dust and stars called the Big Bang. The Sun grew from leftover pieces of stars that existed before the Sun. With the Sun growing bigger, its gravity gets bigger and stronger and gets the other planets to grow and rotate around the Sun. Venus and all other planets grew from leftover pieces of rocks and dirt and formed a thick atmosphere on the planet. The Sun pulled Venus and all other planets to orbit it with its gravity.

Fact credit: Somebody that shall not be named.

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MakeMake is a celestial body

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Takes 85 hours (3.5 earth days) to orbit Jupiter

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venus was named after the roman god of love and beauty

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venus was named after the roman god of love and beauty

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