Presentation on Moon resortWhat is the current estimate of the number of moons in the Solar System? What are the hottest and coldest moons? These were some of the topics covered by Dr. Paul Guttman in this week's session entitled "Mysterious Moons of the Solar System" - part of a series for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The answers, by the way, are 170 as of March 2009 according to The Planetary Society's web site; Jupiter's Io; and Pluto's Charon.

Working togetherMore moons are constantly being discovered, especially in the outer region. Jupiter has the largest number of moons at 63; closely followed by Saturn at 61. Only Mercury and Venus do not have moons. The inner region only has 3 moons - Earth with 1 and Mars with 2.

After a short video on moons that included Jupiter's IO and its very hot lava, Paul led a discussion on the wide variations between moons of the different planets. He eventually turned his attention to the moons of Mars: Deimos and Phobos. They were named for the sons of Ares, the god of war in Greek mythology and stood for terror/dread and panic/fear respectively. Of course, Ares was known as Mars to the Romans.

A finished Phobos moonThe irregular shape of both Phobos and Deimos indicate that they may have been asteroids that were gravitationally captured by Mars. To illustrate the point, the students built models of Phobos - cutting and taping as they went along.

The evening actually started with a presentation by Valerie and Rachel of their plans for a resort on Earth's moon. They discussed some of the attributes of their resort such as how far underground it had to be to protect it from the sun's radiation or how they were going to grow plants using hydroponics with water from the north or south poles. Very interesting and creative indeed!