Word: kuiper
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Potter sees science as a matter of measurements. Accordingly, he utilizes distance, time, and size as our tour guides. First, we travel outwards from Earth, flying by the planets, over the Kuiper belt, through the Oort cloud (what names!), and past the Orion Nebula, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster and beyond. Then we venture downward in magnitude - atoms and quarks and gluons and strings and Higgs bosons. There are also journeys forward from the big bang and the creation of Earth. In between, he stuffs his pages with musings on scientific history, philosophy, and personalities...
...mass to the asteroid belt in our solar system located between Mars and Jupiter, and the outer one is 20 astronomical units from Epsilon Eridani—about the distance from Uranus to the Sun. The outer ring of icy mini-planets surrounding Epsilon Eridani is similar to the Kuiper Belt that is located just beyond Pluto...
...over the past few years, astronomers have realized that Pluto is just an especially big-and not even the biggest-of a giant swarm of icy bodies, known collectively as the Kuiper Belt, which orbits the Sun out beyond Neptune. If it's just one among many, it either has to be downgraded from its original status as a full-fledged planet, or at least a handful of other big Kuiper Belt objects have to be added to the list. But in any case, these lumps of ice haven't melted since the origin of the Solar System some...
...MISSION Using Jupiter's gravity to speed it on its way, New Horizons will be the first probe to take close-up images of Pluto and analyze its atmosphere, thus enabling astronomers to understand how the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt came...
...JUPITER Jupiter gravity assist - February to March 2007 ? URANUS ? NEPTUNE ? PLUTO PLUTO-CHARON ENCOUNTER July 2015. During flyby, the probe will pass within a mere 6,000 miles (10,000 km) of Pluto?40 times as close as the Earth is to our own moon ? KUIPER BELT Voyage into Kuiper Belt 2016-2020 What is the Kuiper Belt? Named for Gerard Kuiper, who predicted its existence in the 1950s, it is a vast, disk-shaped cloud of thousands of icy bodies that starts near Neptune and reaches to about 4.5 billion miles (7.5 billion km)from...