Studying Neptune: Investigating the Unknown

[relativelyslow]

i am doing a project on neptune. a main constituent of this project is deciding what you want to investigate (scientific objectives) about neptune (multiple things can/should be studied). i seem to be having trouble with this. i can't think of much to study because i don't really know what's important to study about a not too well know planet. what has been studied before? i want to do something with the dark spot (i think its a storm), perhaps measure windspeed or something but I'm not sure i can do this from a satellite (everything has to be studied by satellite). i would really appreciate any insight and help anyone can offer. thank you very much in advance

 

[relativelyslow]

this is kind of a pressing matter and i don't know where to start because there are so many different things to measure (infrared, magnetosphere, make up, plasma something, is topography possible for neptune?). i really need help. if you just discovered a planet, what would you want to know about it?

 

[Nereid]

Hope this isn't too late ...

What's known about a planet in our solar system depends rather a great deal on which spaceprobes have visited (or landed on) the planet (or not, in the case of Pluto ... assuming for now that you call it a planet). Neptune has been so visited by only one - Voyager 2.

You could go about your investigation from several different perspectives - e.g. you are designing a new spaceprobe to be sent to Neptune, so what would you want to study? or you looking to understand something about neptune better using the data gathered by Voyager 2 + Hubble Space Telescope images (etc). And so on.

In any case, what you want to do will likely be related to understanding something about the planet (e.g. nature of the Dark Spot, strength of the magnetic field, variation in the composition of the atmosphere by height), not just an observation for its own sake (e.g. 'I wonder what Neptune looks like if I take a picture of it in the light of triply-ionised rhenium?')

 

[The Bob]

I must apologise for not spotting this. I do not normally wonder into the Astronomy & Cosmology Forum much.

Most of what we know about Neptune has come from satellite information (whether it was from the first satellite to it, as Nereid said, or simple spectroscopy to determine what its atmosphere was made of). This simple means that you can write about anything you want to about Neptune (more or less).

If I were doing this project I would start with some facts about the planet (nothing detailed or too technique, just some general knowledge about the planet: e.g. where its name came from and how many moons it has). Then, I think, I would try and give a presentation on why we cannot live there. The obvious problem is that Neptune is made of gas but make it interesting, e.g. what if Neptune's atmosphere replaced the Earth's etc. This topic line will not only allow you to mention windspeed and the Dark Spot but also what the atmosphere is made of and about the problem it can encounter with meteors and the temperature of the planet. None of this information could come from anything other than satellites (either near the planet or in the orbit of Earth).

Hope that might help

The Bob (2004 ©)

 

[Billy T]

You might be interested in current thinking about the perturbations of Neptune that led to the discovery of Pluto. They certainly were not due to Pluto, which is smaller than Earth's moon. Pluto would need to be several times more massive than the Earth (and was believed to be for many years) to cause the perturbations the founder of the Flagstaff AZ observatory (Percival Lowell) used to predict Pluto's location.

I would be interested in what is thought now to have been the cause of these "observed perturbations" Please let me know at local_black_hole@Yahoo.com if you follow up on this or want more information.

 

[Phobos]

an excellent place to begin learning about what is known and what is not...
http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/neptune.html

 

[relativelyslow]

thank you very much for your help. its all over and done with now. seemed to go smoothly. thank you again for the advice

 

[Nereid]

So, without giving too much away, would you mind sharing with us what scientific objectives you wrote for your project?