AST 104 Final

What formation or formations are evidence that the planet Mercury may have shrunk (gotten a bit smaller) as it cooled?

• the big ticket with size 8 crossed out and size 6 written in

• the Caloris basin

• the thin atmosphere emerging from inside the planet

• the long scarps or cliffs

• the large basins in general

The satellite whose surface is characterized by a smooth icy crust with a complex network of cracks is:

• Callisto

• Europa

• Ganymede

• Triton

• Io

The observation that began the 19th and early 20th century fascination with Mars as a place for life was:

• Percival Lowell’s discovery of an entire network of artificial canals built by martians

• the images sent back by the Viking spacecraft mission

• the discovery of the Martian moons

• Schiaparelli’s seeing what seemed to him to be long straight features on the red planet

• the landing of Martian spacecraft in New Jersey in 1938

The same process that explains why astronomers see less helium in the upper atmosphere of Saturn when they take spectra also explains

• the hexagon at one of Saturn’s poles

• the reason Saturn is warmer than we expect

• the strong radio waves we detect from Saturn

• why Saturn has rings

• why the winds near the equator are so high

Two worlds in the outer solar system that seem remarkably similar to each other are:

• Callisto and Io

• Io and Europa

• Titan and Ganymede

• Titan and Triton

• Pluto and Triton

Which planet has the biggest moon relative to its own size? Not the biggest moon in terms of kilometers, but the biggest as a percentage of the size of the planet it orbits.

• Saturn

• Neptune

• Jupiter

• Pluto

• Uranus

Which of the following is NOT a way we have studied the planet Mars so far?

• sending spacecraft to Mars which have brought samples of the planet back to Earth

• observing it through telescopes from Earth

• studying samples of Mars that were blasted off Mars by impacts long ago, and found later on Earth

• landing a spacecraft on the surface and examining the soil in an automated laboratory

• sending a spacecraft into orbit around it

Which of the following characteristics distinguishes Uranus from every other planet in our solar system?

• it rotates on an axis tilted almost 90 degrees to the circle of its orbit

• its orbit is significantly tilted relative to the orbits of the other planets

• its magnetic axis does not lie in the same direction as its rotation axis

• it has more than one moon

• its atmosphere is made of gases

For a while, after the space age began, astronomers did not know what the surface of Titan looks like, but today they do. Which of the following was NOT a method by which astronomers have learned about the surface of Titan?

• using instruments on the Huygens spacecraft to take pictures as it was descending

• using an infrared camera aboard Cassini to take images of the surface in infrared

• using the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit to take a photo of Titan

• using a radar instrument to penetrate the smog in Titan’s atmosphere

• taking a photograph of the surface from a spacecraft that landed on Titan

Tags

NGSS.HS-PS4-3

There was a pair of spacecraft whose components both orbited the planet Mars and landed on its surface in 1976. These spacecraft were called:

• Magellan

• Galileo

• Voyager

• Viking

• Percival & Lowell