Asteroids and Comets
arXiv:1507.06578 · doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-53802-4.00184-6
Abstract
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the process of planetary accretion occur? The objects we see today have suffered many geophysically-relevant processes in the intervening eons that have altered their surfaces, interiors, and compositions. In this chapter we review our understanding of the origins and evolution of these bodies, discuss the wealth of science returned from spacecraft missions, and motivate important questions to be addressed in the future.
84 pages, 27 figures. To be published in Treatise on Geophysics, 2nd edition (G. Schubert, Editor-in-Chief), Volume 10 (T. Spohn, Editor)
References in corpus (12)
- The origins and concentrations of water, carbon, nitrogen and noble gases on Earth
- Building Terrestrial Planets
- Dynamics of rotationally fissioned asteroids: Source of observed small asteroid systems
- Irregular Satellites of the Planets: Products of Capture in the Early Solar System
- Thermal Properties, Sizes, and Size Distribution of Jupiter-Family Cometary Nuclei
- Water Ice and Dust in the Innermost Coma of Comet 103P/Hartley 2
- On the Nature of the Dust in the Debris Disk Around HD69830
- A Herschel Study of D/H in Water in the Jupiter-Family Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova and Prospects for D/H Measurements with CCAT
- Survey of cometary CO2, CO, and particulate emissions using the Spitzer Space Telescope: Smog check for comets
- Carbon Monoxide in Comet 9P/Tempel 1 before and after the Deep Impact Encounter
- A new perspective on the irregular satellites of Saturn - II Dynamical and physical origin
- Observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 with the Keck 1 HIRES Instrument During Deep Impact