In February and March 2007, the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto made a number of pictures of Elara, culminating in photos from a distance of five million miles.
Crochet hook
A crochet hook is a tool used for making crochet fabric. The hook at the end is used to grab yarn. The tool also has a flat part for fingers to hold during work. Crochet hooks come in different sizes for different sizes of yarn.
Pterodaustro
Pterodaustro was a pterosaur. It is found in the Lower Cretaceous of South America. "Pterodaustro" most likely fed on tiny invertebrates: zooplankton and krill.
Pterodaustro was medium sized, having a wing-span about two meters in length and having only been found in Brazil.
"Pterodaustro" probably waded in shallow water like flamingos, straining food with its tooth comb, a method called "filter feeding". Once it caught its food, "Pterodaustro" probably mashed it with the small, globular teeth present in its upper jaw.
At least two specimens have been found with gizzard stones in the stomach cavity, the first ever reported for any pterosaur. These clusters of small stones with angled edges support the idea that "Pterodaustro" ate mainly small, hard-shelled aquatic crustaceans using filter-feeding. Such invertebrates are abundant in the sediment of the fossil site
In 2004 a "Pterodaustro" embryo in an egg was reported. The egg was elongated, six centimetres long and 22 millimetres across and its mainly flexible shell was covered with a thin layer, 0.3 mm thick, of calcite.
Comparisons between the scleral rings (bony ring round edge of eye) of "Pterodaustro" and modern birds and reptiles suggest that it may have been nocturnal, and may have had similar activity patterns to those modern ducks which feed at night.
Dsungaripterus
Dsungaripterus ("Wing of Junggar Basin") was a pterosaur with a wingspan of 10 feet (3 m). It had an unusual bony crest running along its snout and long, narrow, curved jaws with a pointed tip. The crest may have acted as a rudder when flying or may have been a secondary sex characteristic.
"Dsungaripterus"'s head and neck were together almost a metre long. Its most notable feature are its long, narrow, upcurved jaws with a pointed tip, making the animal look like a pair of flying tweezers. It had no teeth in the front part of its jaws, which were probably used to remove shellfish and worms from cracks in rocks or from sandy, muddy beaches. It had knobbly flat teeth more to the back of the jaw that were well suited for crushing shellfish.
Himalia (moon)
Himalia is the biggest non-spherical moon of Jupiter. It was found by Charles Dillon Perrine at the Lick Observatory on December 3, 1904. It is named after the nymph Himalia who bore three sons of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter).
Himalia did not get its present name until 1975; before then, it was simply known as or Jupiter Satellite VI, although calls for a full name appeared shortly after its and Elara's discovery; A.C.D. Crommelin wrote in 1905,
Unfortunately the numeration of Jupiter's satellites is now in precisely the same confusion as that of Saturn's system was before the numbers were abandoned and names substituted. A similar course would seem to be advisable here; the designation V for the inner satellite was tolerated for a time, as it was considered to be in a class by itself; but it has now got companions, so that this subterfuge disappears. The substitution of names for numerals is certainly more poetic.
The moon was sometimes called Hestia, after the Greek goddess, from 1955 to 1975.
It is the biggest member of the group that bears its name, the moons orbiting between 11.4 and 13 million kilometers from Jupiter at an inclination of about 27.5°. The orbital elements are as of January 2000. They are changing a lot due to Solar and planetary perturbations.
A day on Himalia is only about 7 3/4 hours long. Himalia appears grey, like the other members of its group, similar to a C-type asteroid. Measurements by "Cassini" confirm a featureless spectrum, with a slight absorption at 3 μm which could indicate the presence of water.
In November 2000, the Cassini spacecraft, going to Saturn, made a number of pictures of Himalia, including photos from a distance as close as 4.4 million km. The moon covers only a few pixels, but seems to be a stretched object with axes 150 ± 20 and 120 ± 20 km, close to the Earth-based estimations.
In February and March 2007, the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto made a series of pictures of Himalia, culminating in photos from a distance of eight million km. Again, Himalia appears only a few pixels across.
Brachychiton
Brachychiton (also known as the bottletree or kurrajong) is a genus of 31 species of trees and large shrubs. They grow naturally in Australia and New Guinea. Fossils from New South Wales and New Zealand are believed to be 50 million years old. The name "Brachychiton" is comes from the Greek "brachys", meaning "short", and "chiton", meaning "tunic". This refers to its loose seed coverings.
They grow to 4–30m tall. All species have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. The female flowers have five separate carpels that can each form a woody fruit that has several seeds.
Themisto (moon)
Themisto or , is a small prograde non-spherical moon of Jupiter. It was found in 1975, lost, and then refound in 2000.
Themisto was first found by Charles T. Kowal and Elizabeth Roemer on September 30, 1975, reported on October 3, 1975 and designated . However, not enough observations were made to establish an orbit and it was subsequently lost.
Themisto appeared as a footnote in astronomy textbooks into the 1980s. Then, in 2000, a seemingly new moon was found by Scott S. Sheppard, David C. Jewitt, Yanga R. Fernández and Eugene A. Magnier, and was designated . It was soon confirmed that this was the same as the 1975 object. The Sheppard et al. announcement was immediately correlated with an August 6 2000 observation by the team of Brett J. Gladman, John J. Kavelaars, Jean-Marc Petit, Hans Scholl, Matthew J. Holman, Brian G. Marsden, Philip D. Nicholson and Joseph A. Burns — an observation that was reported to the Minor Planet Center but not published as an IAU Circular (IAUC).
In October 2002 it was officially named after Themisto, daughter of the river god Inachus by Zeus (Jupiter) in Greek mythology.
Themisto's orbit is unusual. Unlike most of Jupiter's moons, which orbit in groups, Themisto orbits alone, midway between the Galilean moons and the first group of prograde irregulars.
Themisto is about 8 kilometers in diameter (assuming an albedo of 0.04)
Thebe (moon)
Thebe or ', is the fourth of Jupiter's known moons (by distance from the planet). It was found by Stephen P. Synnott in images from the "Voyager 1" space probe taken on March 5, 1979 and was given the designation '. Later, it was found on images dating back to February 27, 1979. In 1983 it was officially named after the mythological nymph Thebe who was the daughter of the river god Asopus and a lover of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter).
Thebe is the farthest of the inner Jovian moons. It orbits Jupiter at a distance of ~222,000 km (3.11 Jupiter radii). The orbit of Thebe has an orbital eccentricity of ~0.018 and an inclination of ~1.08° relative to the equator of Jupiter. These values are unusually high for a closer moon and can be explained by the past influence of the closest Galilean satellite Io; in the past, several mean motion resonances with Io would have passed through Thebe's orbit as Io gradually moved away from Jupiter, and these excited Thebe's orbit.
Thebe is not a sphere, with the closest ellipsoidal approximation being 116x98x84 km. Its bulk density and mass are not known but assuming that it mean density is like that of Amalthea (~0.86 g/cm³) its mass can be estimated at ~4.3×10 kg.
The surface of Thebe is dark and appears to be reddish in color.