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CCNet 84/2001 - 3 July 2001
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"Pluto has suffered another demotion with scientists discovering a very bright, icy body possibly even larger than the tiny ice-planet's moon Charon and orbiting the Sun in the same celestial neighborhood."
-- Space.com, 2 July 2001

"Dr David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii who has discovered many KBO's, including the first one ever seen, told BBC News Online: "We're inching up to Pluto. It is just a matter of time until we see Pluto 2, Pluto 3 and so on." Robert Millis agrees: "Until the Kuiper Belt has been thoroughly explored, we cannot pretend to know the extent or the content of the Solar System."
-- BBC News Online, 3 July 2001

"Some years ago, Opik and I published a paper on meteorite ejection. We argued that the escape velocity would require an acceleration, and force, exceeding the crushing strength of rocks -- similar to your argument. Since then I have been persuaded by the evidence put forth by Heinrich Waenke and others that certain meteorites did originate from the surface of Mars. The obvious explanation is a slow ejection mechanism rather than an impulsive one, perhaps driven by gas erupting from Mars."
-- S. Fred Singer, 1 July 2001

"... Also virtually impossible would be a gas-entrainment mechanism that might increase the time of acceleration because of gradual expansion following the initial impact. First, there isn't much gas on Mars, and pressure hardly increases sound speed at all. Extreme compression would push many gasses past their triple point and in effect liquify them; this is especially true of the carbon dioxide making up about 95% of the Martian atmosphere. If we assume optimistically that the gas was of Earth air composition, its speed of sound at 300 K would be about 330 m/s. The speed of sound in an ideal gas varies about as the square root of temperature (v oc sqrt(k*T/m). To accelerate a rock to 5 km/s, remembering that the temperature of a gas drops proportional to its expansion rate, we would need the gas in a tightly-fitting, gun-barrel-like cylinder expanding at something like 20 times its speed of sound at 300 K; this would require a temperature of some 400*300 = 120,000 K. The temperature of the Sun's photosphere being only some 5,500 K, this would seem highly unlikely in a mere asteroid impact..."
-- John Michael Williams, 2 July 2001

- ><><><>< - ><><>< - ><>< - ><><>< - ><><><>< -

1. KUIPER BELT OBJECT FOUND POSSIBLY AS LARGE AS PLUTO'S MOON . . .
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, 2 June 2001

2. PLUTO SUFFERS ANOTHER DEMOTION: BIG MOON-SIZED OBJECT FOUND BEYOND NEPTUNE . . .
Space.com, 2 June 2001

3. INCHING UP TO PLUTO AS ANOTHER LARGE KUIPER BELT OBJECT IS FOUND . . .
BBC News Online, 3 July 2001

4. DUST DEVILS RESHAPE MARS . . .
Space.com, 2 June 2001

5. COMETS II: SPACE SCIENCE SERIES ANNOUNCEMENT . . .
Richard P. Binzel

6. EJECTION OF MARTIAN ROCKS . . .
S. Fred Singer

7. EJECTION OF MARTIAN ROCKS I . . .
John Michael Williams

8. THE UNLIKELY PHYSICS OF THE SUPPOSED METEORITES FROM MARS . . .
http://publish.aps.org/eprint/gateway/eplist/aps1999jun25_002

9. EJECTION OF MARTIAN ROCKS II . . .
John Michael Williams

10. TANNER ON TR/J EXTINCTIONS . . .
Hermann Burchard

All currently available at CCNet.

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Dan

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