ABSTRACT

The solar nebula theory hypothesizes that planets are formed from an accretion

disk of material that, over time, condenses into dust, small planetesimals, and

that the planets should have, on average, coplanar, nearly circular orbits. If the

orbit of Pluto has a different origin from the other planets in the Solar System,

then there will be tremendous repercussions on modeling the spacecrafts for

a mission to Pluto. We test here the nebula theory for Pluto. We apply the

general theory for asymptotic distributions of extrinsic means on a manifold in

Chapter 5 to spherical data analysis. Then we use the derived nonparametric

bootstrap based on the large sample distribution of the sample mean direction.

Our nonparametric analysis provides very strong evidence that the solar nebula

theory does not hold for Pluto.