Distinguished Exoplanet Lecture March 7

Mars

• Moons: Phobos here and here; Deimos; flyby
• Polar caps S. pole
• Mariner valley canyon
• surface today: Endurance Crater, Engineering Flats, Columbia Hills, McMurdo panorama, clouds and sand
• The Face: Viking, 1976, Mars Globar Surveyor, 1998, Mars Express.
  another face, and a brain
• Craters
• Mount Olympus
• Water
  Past flows: channels, gullies, neutron Mars
  Present flows: landslides i.e., recurring slope lineae
  Phoenix lander blast cone and excavation
• Curiosity selfie and rearview
• a possible meteoritic fossil indication of life?

Jovian Planets: Gas and Ice Giants

The Jovian Planets

Jupiter: The Prototype

• movies: approaching and orbiting Jupiter
• Jovian interiors
• Great Red Spot image, zoom, movies: black&white, color
• more Jupiter movies

Saturn

Rings: the Roche Limit

• Saturn: rings edge-on, illuminated from below, spokes
• Cassini
  movies: ring crossing--a must-see!, moons in motion
  images: density waves in rings, rings in UV, rings in natural color, translucent C-ring, IR Saturn
• Jupiter
• Uranus

Ice Giants: Uranus and Neptune

Debris I: Asteroids

• Distribution and Orbits
  • Inner Solar System objects plotted
  • Main Belt objects: Ceres and Vesta lineup, Gaspara, Ida & Dactyl
  • Near-Earth objects
  • orbits seen from top vs side
  • current events: asteroid collision detected
• Earth infall: meteors: Leonids, one fireball, another, and another, Peekskill meteor video
• Feb 15, 2013: Chelyabinsk meteor flash, crater, videos of fall, impact, Daily Show take
• Structure: NEAR Mission to asteroid Eros:
  Eros overview, rotation movie, zoom, extreme closeup composition