Orbit of Comets

Related BrainMass Solutions

• Comets

  358119 Comets Orbital in a Solar System Where in the solar system do most of the comets reside? What are the parts of a comet when it is near the Sun? Describe two ways in which a comets orbit may change.

• Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets

  Comets tend to have elliptical orbits that cut across the orbits of planets. This takes them very close to the sun but also very far away, past Pluto in most cases. They can take 200 years to 30 million years to orbit the sun (Darlington, 1984).

• Jupiter and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

  On a side note, if you do some research on comets, their makeup can vary between different kinds of rocks, and large frozen chunks of ice.

• Planets

  made of Ice and Rocks and usually follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun The escape velocity from the Earth is 25,000 Miles per hour.

• Calculating gravitation for Halley's Comet

  Many other comets have orbits that extend much farther from the sun, and hence have much longer periods. At aphelion, a typical long-period comet is about 8x10^12km from the sun; at perihelion, it passes inside the earth's orbit.

• Venus and Earth are about the same size and mass, yet carbon dioxide is a major constituent of the atmosphere of Venus, while oxygen is much more abundant in the Earth's atmosphere. Explain why the atmospheres are so different.

  What knowledge do comets and asteroids provide to studies of the origin of the solar system? g.

• Semi-major axis; compare t distance to Pluto,Alpha Centauri

  355351 Comet Hyakutake: Semi-major axis; compare to distance to Pluto, Alpha Centauri One of the brightest comets of the 20th century was Comet Hyakutake, which passed close to the sun in early 1996.

• On Solar System Missions

  Finding them in comets can have significant impact in our understanding of what comets are, about the structure and origins of the solar system and our Earth (including life on Earth).

• Planetary evolution and the early solar system

  While asteroids are solid rock, comets are icy chunks of volatile organic and non-organic materials.