How we came to know the first dwarf planet
December 31, 2014 4:34 PM Subscribe
So if you had been reading about all this 200 years ago, there would have been at least two important differences from now. One is that your Internet connection would have been considerably slower. The other is that you might have learned in school or elsewhere that Ceres was a planet.As the Dawn probe is only months away from reaching Ceres, chief engineer and mission director Marc Rayman provides a brief history of the discovery and study of Ceres. Bonus: The maths behind the discovery of Ceres
I know everything I need to know about Ceres from this Movie when we get proper space travel we can attend the Dance Contest.
posted by boilermonster at 6:37 PM on December 31, 2014
posted by boilermonster at 6:37 PM on December 31, 2014
Yeah, but its a dwarf planet.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:39 PM on December 31, 2014
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:39 PM on December 31, 2014
I was expecting the second link to go to an explanation of Bode's law. Ceres is interesting for a number of reasons including the fact that it may have liquid water and where there's water...
posted by euphorb at 6:41 PM on December 31, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by euphorb at 6:41 PM on December 31, 2014 [2 favorites]
...there's oil! Let's liberate!
posted by slater at 6:44 PM on December 31, 2014 [8 favorites]
posted by slater at 6:44 PM on December 31, 2014 [8 favorites]
Wow this was really useful, this week I spent a lot of time studying orbital mechanics. This stuff is always a pain to calculate, it's all in spherical coordinates and you generally deal with calculating two orbital planes, one for the planetoid like Ceres, and one for the observer on Earth. To fix the orbit of Ceres, you really need to calculate its heliocentric orbit, when you're observing it from a geocentric system, so you are constantly converting between polar coordinate systems.
The math link cites a paper from the Mathematical Association of America paywalled at JSTOR. But there is a free copy you can download directly from the MAA site. That is quite a paper.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:07 PM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]
The math link cites a paper from the Mathematical Association of America paywalled at JSTOR. But there is a free copy you can download directly from the MAA site. That is quite a paper.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:07 PM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]
I was excited and disappointed in the photos from Eros since it was so so barren.
The Hubble photos of Ceres is making me expect a real planet looking thing, I am trying to get my expectations in line.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 7:50 PM on December 31, 2014
The Hubble photos of Ceres is making me expect a real planet looking thing, I am trying to get my expectations in line.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 7:50 PM on December 31, 2014
The Hubble photos of Ceres is making me expect a real planet looking thing, I am trying to get my expectations in line.
Think more moon, or more properly, The Moon, rather than something like Mars, Venus, or Earth. 1 Ceres is far too small to have a useful atmosphere.
posted by eriko at 8:29 PM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]
Think more moon, or more properly, The Moon, rather than something like Mars, Venus, or Earth. 1 Ceres is far too small to have a useful atmosphere.
posted by eriko at 8:29 PM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]
a real planet looking thing
Well, we know it's spherical, so planet looking is not that far off. Expectations of low-gravity unicorns and lancers may have to be adjusted, however. Eros is just another asteroid, which is to say, an oddly-shaped rock tumbling through space.
Yeah, but its a dwarf planet.
I just don't know why this is a thing for some people. The classification of Ceres has changed more than once in history. The categories are for convenience, and I am reasonably certain that none of the solar system bodies is supplied with an ego.
posted by dhartung at 11:43 PM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]
Well, we know it's spherical, so planet looking is not that far off. Expectations of low-gravity unicorns and lancers may have to be adjusted, however. Eros is just another asteroid, which is to say, an oddly-shaped rock tumbling through space.
Yeah, but its a dwarf planet.
I just don't know why this is a thing for some people. The classification of Ceres has changed more than once in history. The categories are for convenience, and I am reasonably certain that none of the solar system bodies is supplied with an ego.
posted by dhartung at 11:43 PM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]
> I am reasonably certain that none of the solar system bodies is supplied with an ego.
Jupiter will smite you!
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:44 AM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
Jupiter will smite you!
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:44 AM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]
the fact that it may have liquid water and where there's water...
How many billionaires are there on the planet? How many trillionaires? What's the next monetary unit after trillion?
We need some movies that are a bit more realistic than Trek about how hard it is to get to the "asteroid belt" and the realities of low power but true continuous acceleration. And how mind numbingly beyond imagination rich the first real asteroid miner that can bring H2O, reaction mass and gold into earth orbit.
Mars is a boondoggle, people are living just fine in a tin can in orbit, give them a real me with a centrifuge to sleep in, water and construction material and there's no turning back!
posted by sammyo at 5:51 AM on January 1, 2015
How many billionaires are there on the planet? How many trillionaires? What's the next monetary unit after trillion?
We need some movies that are a bit more realistic than Trek about how hard it is to get to the "asteroid belt" and the realities of low power but true continuous acceleration. And how mind numbingly beyond imagination rich the first real asteroid miner that can bring H2O, reaction mass and gold into earth orbit.
Mars is a boondoggle, people are living just fine in a tin can in orbit, give them a real me with a centrifuge to sleep in, water and construction material and there's no turning back!
posted by sammyo at 5:51 AM on January 1, 2015
In addition to the geometrical problem, Gauss also had to solve an incredibly important statistical/estimation problem in order to find Ceres: how do you take a few observations that each include some amount of error, and figure out how to minimize the total amount of error in the combined solution. Its difficult to overstate the lasting significance of his solution, the Method of Least Squares. It is essentially the foundation of modern signal processing (e.g. getting a clear signal on your cell phone over a noisy channel) and statistical analysis (e.g. using a small number of samples to draw broader about the larger population). I am at this very moment reading Metafilter while waiting for my code to compile for a least-mean-square adaptive filter that is based on Gauss' algorithm.
posted by jpdoane at 9:40 AM on January 1, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by jpdoane at 9:40 AM on January 1, 2015 [3 favorites]
I dunno. Texas has more rodeos, but if Ceres has more water I might get interested.
I'll wait for the pictures.
posted by mule98J at 11:33 AM on January 1, 2015
I'll wait for the pictures.
posted by mule98J at 11:33 AM on January 1, 2015
Is it inhabited by a diminutive race of miner/craftspeople?
posted by snottydick at 10:24 AM on January 13, 2015
posted by snottydick at 10:24 AM on January 13, 2015
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