[Baps] Planetary Talk Monday Sept. 13 Fred Singer

[Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay]

EPS End of Summer Seminar

Phobos-Deimos and the Early History of Mars 

Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

The Martian moons may hold the key to the early history of Mars and the
other terrestrial planets.  I will present arguments against simple capture
and co-formation.  To satisfy the time constraints on Mars core formation
set by Hf-W isotope arguments, we investigate possible sources of energy to
promote early melting of the planet, including gravitational energy of
accretion and the radioactive decay energy of Al-26.  An additional source
is tidal friction, as pointed out long ago by Francis Birch.  It leads to a
hypothesis for the origin of Phobos and Deimos as the remnants of a much
larger original satellite captured by Mars.  We discuss dynamic constraints
and possible observations to verify the hypothesis.

Monday, September 13, 1pm
4th floor, Hoffman Laboratory, 20 Oxford St.
Directions: http://www.eps.harvard.edu/directions.php




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/baps/attachments/20040907/11cdc044/attachment.htm