Ceres In 2006, the International Astronautical Federation formally defined both planets and dwarf planets. “A “dwarf planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the…
Last week in my lab’s journal club I was presenting on two white papers detailing the reasoning for possible missions to explore the outer solar system. These papers are part of the Astro2020 decadal survey, and I figured I would share some thoughts on them here. As both papers are short (<10 pages each) and…
2 Months It’s been two months since New Horizon’s new year flyby of Ultima Thule, proper name (486958) 2014 MU69. Data from the flyby is still trickling in and being poured over by planetary scientist, but the results so far show Ultima Thule to both be a good fit for data taken from the ground, as…
New Year, New Science Next week, as we ring in the new year, a spacecraft called New Horizons will push the boundary of human knowledge by being the first spacecraft to preform a close flyby of a Kuiper belt object. This isn’t the first time the grand piano sized spacecraft has embiggen human knowledge. From…
Recap of Lagrange Points In the circular restricted three body problem, there are a set of 5 points that if we place our spacecraft there, it’ll never move relative to the two bodies. These are called the Lagrange points and are the only equilibrium points for the system. Whenever we find an equilibrium point in…
Review of the n-body Problem The n-body problem is when some number of bodies are interacting with each other gravitationally, and you want to figure out what their movement will be at some arbitrary point in the future. I wrote a full post on the problem and it’s difficulties here. I highly recommend that post…
Series Overview: This series will be a write up of “Source book in Astronomy 1900-1950”. The book is split up into 13 sections with each one covering a different topic in astronomy. My plan is that as I read through each topic I write up the important points and then condense all of my notes…
