Homework: Missions to Icy Bodies

Astronomy 23/223 Homework:

Missions to Icy Bodies

This week we began to study to our solar system by looking at some other familiar objects: their satellites. The list below includes all the known satellites of the outer planets:

1	Ganymede	30	Helene
2	Callisto	31	Atlas
3	Io	32	Telesto
4	Europa	33	Calypso
5	Amalthea	34	Pan
6	Himalia	35	Oberon
7	Thebe	36	Titania
8	Elara	37	Ariel
9	Metis	38	Umbriel
10	Pasiphae	39	Miranda
11	Carme	40	Puck
12	Sinope	41	Portia
13	Lysithea	42	Juliet
14	Ananke	43	Belinda
15	Adrastea	44	Cressida
16	Leda	45	Rosalind
17	Titan	46	Desdemona
18	Rhea	47	Bianca
19	Iapetus	48	Ophelia
20	Dione	49	Cordelia
21	Tethys	50	Triton
22	Enceladus	51	Proteus
23	Mimas	52	Nereid
24	Hyperion	53	Larissa
25	Phoebe	54	Galatea
26	Epimetheus	55	Despina
27	Janus	56	Thalassa
28	Prometheus	57	Naiad
29	Pandora

We’ve spent a lot of time in this class discussing how politics control the space program. In this homework, we begin an inquiry into this interesting area, in order to give you a feeling for which questions planetary scientists are currently involved in answering. Your problem set for this week is to do the following:

Use the resources available to you on the web to find out which of these satellites currently have FUNDED missions that will explore them. You can also include missions to comets and/or asteroids. Select THREE of these missions, and write a paragraph about each one giving the following information:

1.	Name of the mission

2.	Its web site

3.	Scientific goals of the mission (i.e., what science questions will be answered?)

4.	Launch date

This page was created by Darby Dyar and is maintained by Darby Dyar and Rebekah Robson-May.
Last updated on 21 November, 2003 .