The Solar System

The Sun is our closest star.  It is a class of G2.  Its heat comes from deep inside the Sun, particles combine to produce heavier particles and release energy.  This process makes a LOT of energy.  Energy generated in the Sun's core takes a million years to reach its surface. Every second 700 million tons of hydrogen are converted into helium ashes. In the process 5 million tons of pure energy is released; therefore, as time goes on the Sun is becoming lighter. It happens because the Sun is huge and there is a lot of pressure at the center.  Fusion does not normally happen on the Earth.

The Moon is our closest neighbor in space. Its diameter is 3500 km, about the same as the distance from Perth to Sydney. It is 385,000 km away - equal to 15 round-the-world trips, or further than an average car is driven in its lifetime. Yet a beam of light covers this distance in one second! The Moon travels at 4000 km/hour in its orbit around the Earth.

The moon was first seen through a telescope by Harriot, and later by Galileo, both in 1609. It was soon found to be a world without air or water. Shadows on the moon seen with the telescope are so sharp because of the lack of a moon atmosphere. A moon day is 2 weeks long. The weather forecast for the moon is always the same: hot sunny days, cold nights, no wind, no rain, max 130 ^oC, min -170 ^oC.

CRATERS

The moon has many craters, formed from impact of numerous meteorites. About 50,000 craters can be seen with the 32 cm telescope, including:
Plato, 100 km wide, with a large dark floor.
Tycho, 85 km wide, with steep high walls and white rays.
Theophilus, 100 km wide, 5 km deep, with a 2 km high central peak
Plinius, 43 km wide, with a distinctive central peak and craterlet. Plinius is between the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Tranquillity. The crater Dawes to the north-east is 18 km in diameter.
Copernicus, 93 km wide, with a central peak, and white rays.
The largest easily visible crater is Ptolemaeus, 153 km diameter.
 

LANDFORMS
 

RILLES
Rilles are grooves in the Moon’s surface caused by faulting. The two Cauchy Rilles can be seen in the eastern part of the Sea of Tranquillity. Ariadeus Rille and Hyginus Rille are in the highlands west of the Sea of Tranquillity.

WRINKLES
Sometimes the lava forming the Seas wrinkled as it solidified. These wrinkles can be seen when the Seas are under low light. Look for wrinkles in the Seas of Tranquillity and Serenity.

RAYS
Full moon is the best time to see the bright rays of debris radiating from craters. The rays from Tycho radiate for 1,500 km in all directions. Copernicus has prominent rays 600 km long running across the Sea of Rains and the Ocean of Storms.

SEAS

When the Moon is full, it is easiest to see what were once thought to be seas and oceans on the moon. These are actually vast plains of dark-colored lava. The lava flows partly flooded some older large craters, resulting in curved mountain ranges such as the Appenines.

The seas are of two types:
1. Regular seas, with mountainous boundaries:
Sea of Serenity (Serenitatis)
Sea of Crises (Crisium)
Sea of Rains or Showers (Imbrium), with the curved Bay of Rainbows
at the northwest edge

2. Irregular seas:
Sea of Clouds (Nubium)
Sea of Cold (Frigoris)
Ocean of Storms (Procellarum)
Sea of Tranquillity (Tranquillitatis).

APOLLO 11 LANDING SITE
On 20th July 1969, Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. The landing area is easily visible through the
telescope. The 1969 footprints are still there, since there is no wind or rain to obliterate them!

APOLLO 12 LANDING SITE
On 19th November 1969, Apollo 12 landed in the Ocean of Storms. Second lunar landing, the first to make a pinpoint lunar landing touching down some 600 feet from the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe. 

APOLLO 14 LANDING SITE
On 5th February 1971, Apollo 14 landed in Fra Mauro.  Third  lunar landing and  the first successful mission devoted entirely to science exploration of the moon.. 

APOLLO 15 LANDING SITE
On 30th July 1971, Apollo 15 landed in Hadley - Apennine mountains.  Fourth lunar landing. First of the extended scientific expeditions. called J- missions featuring extended lunar stay time, longer-duration backpacks and the battery-powered Lunar Rover. The Apollo 15 service module was the first to be equipped with the new Scientific Instrument Module.

APOLLO 16 LANDING SITE
On 20th April 1972, Apollo 16 landed in Descartes highlands.  Fifth lunar landing, first exploration of the moon's central highlands.  Included a apace walk lasting 1 hour, 24 minutes.

APOLLO 17 LANDING SITE
On 11th December 1972, Apollo 17 landed in Tayrys-Littrow.  Sixth and final Apollo lunar landing.  This mission brought the first professional scientist to land on the moon.  First U. S. manned night launch.  Longest Apollo flight.  Space walk lasted 1 hour, 7 minutes.

The last time humans were on the moon December 14, 1972

MOONS
Jupiter has 39 moons.  Eleven we discovered in 2001.

CLOUDS
The distinctive cloud bands across Jupiter are weather patterns. The yellow-white colors we see are clouds of ammonia lifted high by rising convection currents. Jupiter has the “Great Red Spot” - a big storm that has been raging for over 400 years. It is twice the size of the Earth. However it should be renamed to the “Great White Spot” - although it used to be red due to phosphorus and sulphur, at present white clouds dominate it.
 

MYSTERIES

1. Ganymede is comparatively small
2. It is able to lose heat quickly
3. Been doing this for 4,500,000,000 years
4. It should be cold and dead
5. So why does it have:
A huge magnetic field (which requires interior heat), and
Half a surface covered with smooth ice and no craters (indicating an active surface)?

1. Io is hot
2. So it has volcanoes
3. Volcanoes pump material out into space - forming a plasma doughnut around Jupiter
4. Been doing this for 4,500,000,000 years
5. So why is there much of Io left?

WHAT IS IT?
Is it a planet with ears? The space shuttle? A teapot? A pretzel? Coke can? Is it a winged beast?

Back in 1610 Galileo (using the first telescope) just couldn’t work it out. These are his drawings of what he saw. Finally in 1659, Christian Huygens solved the problem. It was... Saturn, a planet with rings!
 

Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft visited Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Compare Galileo’s guesses with their close-up view:
Saturn has seven major rings with hundreds of colored ringlets, with braids, knots, spokes, and divisions kept clear by shepherd satellites.
Rings are made of particles of rock, dust and frozen gases, of sizes ranging from houses down to specks of dust.
While the rings are only 100m thick, the tip-to-tip rings diameter is a huge 274,000 km - would comfortably fit between Earth and Moon as shown to scale below!
 

THE PLANET

· Diameter 120,000 km
· Weight 95 times Earth.
· Surface temperature -180^oC
· 1,430,000,000 km from the Sun
· Day is 10hr 40 minutes long
· It spins so fast that it is flattened at the poles
· Made of hydrogen and helium, with methane and ammonia clouds, a liquid hydrogen ocean and metallic hydrogen core. The surface looks uniform because high-altitude haze conceals the clouds below.
· Saturn is a lightweight despite its size. Its surface gravity is LESS than that here on Earth! 0.92

THE RINGS ARE YOUNG

Evidence for this is that:
1. They change rapidly, and are spreading towards the planet. Old rings should have settled down and be unchanging.
2. They are complex and detailed. Old rings should be plain and uniform.
3. Dust and water vapor in the rings becomes electrically charged and is pushed down to Saturn by its magnetic field. The rings lose material at such a rate that they will disappear in only tens of thousands of years.

WHERE did the rings come from?
They can’t be the remains of a comet or other stray object that came too close and was torn apart. The rings are in the exact plane of Saturn’s tilted equator, indicating they were formed with the planet. Neither can they be one of Saturn’s previous moons that decided to self-destruct. If such a moon was unstable, it would have blown up billions of years ago.
 

THE MOONS

Saturn has 30 moons at last count. On the moons ice is dominant, so are craters. Moon densities increase with distance from Saturn. This contradicts theory, and is also opposite to Jupiter’s moons.

THE LARGER MOONS
Five Saturnian moons can be seen as pinpoints in the telescope:
1. TITAN (5100 km) This is the home of the Jaffa. Orange atmosphere, dark brown seas and land. But don’t try to
eat this one - the orange is nitrogen and ethane smog (Earth isn’t the only place with a UV problem). The seas are liquid natural gas at -180^oC. It has glaciers, lakes, rain and snow, all of methane.
2. IAPETUS (1600 km) Snow-white water-ice one side, black the other. The black is dark dust scattered through space by another moon, Phoebe. Very heavily cratered.
3. RHEA (1300 km) A very bright moon.
4. TETHYS (1050 kms) Sports a massive 400 km crater Odysseus, which cracked the moon apart, but fortunately for Tethys, the bits fell back together again without too much left over.
5. DIONE (970 km) A dense and massive moon.

OTHER MOONS
1. MIMAS (400 km) It sports a huge crater. The impact cracked through to the other side. It shepherds particles out of Cassini’s Division in the rings.

2. PHOEBE (200 km) Mystery moon. A retrograde moon - orbits opposed to all other moons & the planet, so the only explanation is that it must be a captured asteroid. Phoebe is so small that it does not have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape. But spherical it is!

3. JANUS and EPIMETHEUS are two halves of a shattered satellite. They orbit extremely close to each other. One moon gradually catches up with the other. Then the two moons revolve around each other and actually trade orbits! This happens about every four years. But they don’t collide and don’t deflect out of orbit!

MYSTERIES

Mystery 1
1. IAPETUS, a moon of Saturn, is peppered with craters.
2. At estimated current rates it would take 1,000,000,000,000 years to produce the crater density observed.
3. But Iapetus on the evolutionary time scale is only 4,500,000,000 years old.
4. Therefore present processes cannot explain what we see.
 

Mystery 2
1. Saturn is nearly twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter, and gets much less energy from the Sun. Energy drives the winds and weather.
2. Therefore we expect Saturn to be less windy than Jupiter.
1. So why do Saturn winds reach 1800 km/h - far more windy than Jupiter?
 

Mystery 3
1. Saturn has a huge magnetic field.
2. One theory for generating a magnetic field in a planet is the dynamo mechanism. Only this dynamo mechanism could cause the magnetic field to last as long as 4,500,000,000 years.
3. The dynamo requires the planet’s rotational axis and magnetic axes to be considerably different in orientation. However, Saturn’s rotational and magnetic axes almost coincide - they are only 0.7° apart!
4. So the mechanism for the magnetic field cannot be a dynamo.
5. So the magnetic field, and hence Saturn itself, cannot be 4,500,000,000 years old!

Mystery 4
1. Saturn has mysteries - many more than just these.
2. Mysteries should cause us to look again at our theories and assumptions.
3. One theory has Saturn evolving from a cloud of gas 4,500,000,000 years ago.
4. A second theory is that Saturn was created by God much more recently.
5. The first theory has to work hard to explain some of the things we observe.
6. Nothing we are aware of disproves the second theory.
7. So why do so many people accept the first theory without question?

since May 6, 2002

Last update on 10/12/2006