Exam 12: Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies

Until spacecraft flew by asteroids, scientists did not have a good idea of what they looked like. Which of the following missions was the first to fly by an asteroid?

Do icy cometary nuclei melt and move from solid to liquid phase as they are warmed by the radiation from the Sun?

A recent estimate finds that approximately 800 meteorites with mass greater than 0.1 kg strike the surface of the Earth each day. If a house covers an area of roughly 100 m², then what is the probability that your house will be struck by a meteorite in your 100-year lifetime? Note that the radius of the Earth is 6,400 km.

Although asteroids are small individually, when combined they make up about a quarter of all the mass in the Solar System, excluding the Sun.

If you can model the mass in Comet Halley as a sphere 5 km in radius, what is its density if it has a mass of 10¹⁴ kg? How does that density compare to that of water (1,000 kg/m³)?

The darkest asteroids are:

Suppose we discover a comet whose orbit was very highly eccentric, retrograde, had a very large tilt with respect to the ecliptic plane, and a period of 2,000 years. Where is the most likely place of origin for this comet?

In the early universe, when the Solar System had yet to be cleared of the debris out of which it formed, which type of object would have been most likely to deposit water onto Earth's surface?

Iron meteorites are fragments of which type of asteroid?