Week 7

Week 7, Small bodies

Lecture 3.11: Asteroids and meteorite delivery

These are some nice papers on the dynamics in the inner and main asteroid belts.
Everything works better with the Yarkovsky effect

Lecture 3.12: The compositons of asteroids

Lecture 3.13: Impact hazards

NASA's Near Earth Object program, centered at JPL, does an excellent job of tracking NEO, carefully computing orbits, and assessing their risks. This is all extremely good stuff and is an example of the right sort of approach to the hazard: collect data; determine level of risk; and (when you see that it is small) chill.

Lecture 3.14: The Kuiper belt

Alessandro Morbidelli wrote a nice review paper a few years back that is still very relevant today

Lecture 3.15: Properties of dwarf planets

Haumea is a crazy place, and I've written about it a lot
Makemake and Quaoar get talked about less
The best place to read about the discoveries of all of these dwarf planets is a memoir by one of the guys involved in the discoveries.

Lecture 3.16: Why Pluto had to die

My favorite piece on why Pluto is not a planet is here but I've written about it once or twice....

Lecture 3.17: Dynamical instabilities

The classic papers on the Nice model are the first three papers on this list
The Los Angeles Times did a cover article all about the Nice model (!) a few months ago. The pictures and video are spectacular.

Lecture 3.18: The Grand Tack

The original Grand Tack paper can be found here.
A nice review article on terrestrial planet formation which lays the arguments out in a more extended for is here.

Lecture 3.19: Sedna