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Planetary Science 2014 – Part 8
Except for the Voyagers, Galileo is the only mission that has visited Jupiter and its moons
and Cassini is the only mission that has been to Saturn and its moons. Voyagers I & II are
still an active mission, though they were launched in 1977. It was and still is an incredible
mission – Voyager I has now been traveling for 35 years and more than 18.5 billion miles.
It takes 19 hours to get a signal from the Voyagers, and the onboard computer has about
the same amount of computing power as a $5.00 calculator bought at Staples. Voyager I with
its Golden Record has now passed by the heliopause and left the Solar System for the very first time,
and Voyager II will follow. The JPL website provides all the necessary
information for the asteroid and comet missions that have been launched to study, encounter,
shoot objects at, and gather and bring materials back to Earth. Stardust launched in 1999,
had a rendezvous with Comet Wild-2 in 2004, extended its “flycatcher” with Aerogel
to collect cometary debris from near the coma, and returned to Earth to drop the samples
in the Utah desert in 2006. The Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston analyzed the
materials. We know that comets contain alcohols, glycine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs) – and both volatile and stable organics. As I stated before, there is no prior Planetary
Science event to use as a study guide for the 2014 event as this is the first time that
Dusty has written the Solar System event since he became the National Event Supervisor for
B Division Reach for the Stars/Solar System. I will warn you that Dusty is completing his
doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin and his specialty is subsurface hydrology
and he is working on the instrumentation that will be used with the JUICE mission to Europa
in 2022. Also, in 2014 Dusty will be working at JPL. He also works with the Ice Cap mission
in Antarctica. The Planetary Science event should be very exciting!
The AAVSO website has this PowerPoint presentation listed, as well as the webinar. After the
2014 competition the event with answer key will be posted there to be used as a study
guide for types of questions to expect on the 2015 event. The Chandra website posts
the webinars, which AAVSO and the National Science Olympiad (NSO) link to, so the webinars
are available from three sources. Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a great
website to gather images to study as they post all of the most important images and
results from the missions along with brief descriptions. The Astronomy coaches’ manual
is not useful for the solar system events as it focuses on the C Division Astronomy
event. It will be useful when solar system rotates back into the Reach for the Stars
topic. Study materials and resources are being developed for the Solar System event that
will provide the same materials as the Astronomy coaches’ manual and they will be posted
by the University of Texas and linked from the NSO website as they become available.