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Space Rocks: Impacts of our Smallest Neighbors

Explore the fascinating world of asteroid impacts and their effects on our solar system. From the chaos caused by Jupiter's gravity to the history of impacts on Earth, discover the past, present, and future of these celestial collisions. Learn about NASA's WISE Mission and our efforts to detect and potentially prevent future impacts.

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Space Rocks: Impacts of our Smallest Neighbors

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  1. Space Rocks Impacts of our smallest neighbors

  2. Asteroid Belt Asteroid Belt

  3. Primitive Solar System • The four inner planets formed, • but Jupiter’s huge gravity caused • chaos in the region past Mars. • No big planet ever formed there

  4. Craters in the Inner Solar System Mars’s Southern Highlands Mercury

  5. Impacts on Moons Mars’s tiny moon Phobos Mimas, a moon of Saturn

  6. Lunar Cratering Our Moon shows a history of impacts Most of these occurred long ago…

  7. The Asteroid Belt is Sparse On average, there are more than 1 million km between asteroids

  8. DynamicCollisionsDo OccurAnd the effects are seen throughout the Solar System

  9. Jupiter Shows Recent Impacts The world watched as a comet collided with Jupiter in 1994 Possibly not as rare as we thought. Other collisions have occurred since, like this one in 2009

  10. More than 170 Impact Craters on Earth

  11. Earth Erases History of Impacts Barringer Crater, Arizona Roter Kamm, Namibia Wolf Creek, Australia

  12. Chicxulub and the Dinosaurs

  13. Recent Earth Impacts 2008 TC3- first celestial object tracked by astronomers before entering Earth’s atmosphere Tunguska in Russia 1909

  14. Meteorites Chunks of asteroids sometimes make it through the atmosphere to the ground These are time capsules telling us about how matter came together in the early Solar System

  15. Future Impacts • Meteoroids smaller than a house will explode in our atmosphere 5-10 meter objects hit about once a year • Larger objects are rare but devastating We don’t know when the next big impact will happen, but it will eventually

  16. Can we Stop an Impact? Our best chance of avoiding an impact is having advance notice of a threat

  17. NASA’s WISE Mission Using Infrared technology to see dark asteroids • WISE finds asteroids - including some seen for the first time • 100,000s of Main Belt Asteroids • 100s of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)

  18. The Challenge Could be Ours If we do find an asteroid headed for Earth…

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