Astronomy Exam 2
The Lunar Maria are thought to have been caused by ancient
lava flows from large impacts
The Law of Inertia states that a moving object will
keep moving if no force acts on it
As viewed from the star Polaris, Venus
rotates clockwise and goes around the Sun counter-clockwise
Viking 1 and 2 were sent to explore
the planet Mars
Apollo 11 made the first
crewed landing on the Moon
The first successful soft landing on the Moon was Surveyor 1 in
1966
Which of the following densities is closest to the average density of the Earth?
5200kg/m³
Which of the following types of objects include things that could reasonably be described as "flying rocks" or, for the larger ones, "flying mountains?"
Asteroids
Which of these Mars rovers has been operating on the surface of Mars for six years so far (as of 2018).
Curiosity
Which of the following objects has no magnetic field at all?
Earth's Moon
Which of the following planets has a moon that rises in the West?
Mars
Which of these planets has a solar day that is very close to an Earth day in length?
Mars
Which of the following planets can be said to have almost no atmosphere?
Mercury
The first space probes to land on another planet were from the
Russian Venera series
Why couldn't we just fly a Space Shuttle to the Moon for at least a fly-by?
The Space Shuttle did not have enough fuel to reach escape velocity
You are standing in an elevator that is accelerating upward at 1m/s². Which of the following pairs of forces is an action-reaction pair that have to be exactly equal and opposite to each other?
The force that the floor of the elevator exerts on you and the force that you exert on the floor of the elevator
Water ice can be found on all but one of these planets. Which one has no ice?
Venus
Which of the following planets or moons has an atmosphere with about 90 times the surface pressure of Earth's.
Venus
Which planet has no magnetic field?
Venus
The ancient Greeks thought that
a heavy object should fall faster than a lighter object because the heavy object is pulled down with more force
In comparison to Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion, Newton's theory of Universal Gravitation predicted
almost the same motions but with corrections
Mars has
an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with about 1% the surface pressure of Earth's
On Earth, you might find a temperature of 59°F on a Spring or Fall day in the temperate zone. On Mars, you might expect that temperature
at noon near the equator
For a planet to have substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface, it must have
atmospheric pressure above the triple point of water
Which of the following objects would be most likely to have a long elliptical orbit that takes it from far outside the orbit of Mars to a close approach to the Sun?
comet
The magnetic field of Mars is
essentially zero
Suppose that a spacecraft is in a roughly circular orbit near the surface of the Earth, moving at around 5 miles per second. Suppose the spacecraft flips over backwards and fires its rocket engine to slow its speed to 4.96 miles per second. The spacecraft will then
follow an ellipse that descends a bit and then rises again
Freely falling objects with different masses fall with the same acceleration because
gravity exerts more force on the more massive object
Mercury rotates so that it
has a solar day that last for two complete orbits around the Sun
The force of gravity explains
how the tides work but not how lightning works
The Moon's orbit around the Earth
is elliptical enough to give us an annular solar eclipse when the Moon is near its apogee
The observed magnetic field of Mercury is surprising because it was expected to have
no magnetic field at all because it rotates so slowly
When Newton's Laws were applied to predict the exact motion of the planet Uranus, the prediction failed to agree with very precise measurements. This failure led to the discovery
of the Planet Neptune
The phase diagram for water is presented on a graph with axes for temperature and
pressure
The Earth's magnetic field plays an essential role in
protecting the Earth from charged particles from the Sun
At present (within the last few hundred years) the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is
slightly elliptical so that the intensity of sunlight varies by 6 percent
A full cycle of day and night on Mars is called a `sol.' In terms of 24 hour Earth days, a Martian sol is
slightly longer than one Earth day
Since the last Apollo mission to the Moon and the last Soviet LUNA sample-return mission
spacecraft began to be sent there again by 1994
The Soviet Union had a secret program to put the first human on the Moon. This program
test launched their Moon Rocket several times, but it blew up each time
When Newton calculated the magnitude of the acceleration of Earth's Moon relative to the Earth, and compared it to the acceleration of falling objects on the surface of the Earth, he found that
the Moon's acceleration was smaller
An astronomical unit is defined to be
the average distance from the Earth to the Sun
For an object that is moving along a straight path, the acceleration is
the change in the object's speed divided by the time it takes
Suppose that you drop two objects from the same height at the same time. Both objects are heavy enough to be unaffected by air resistance. If one object is twice as heavy as the other, Aristotle would predict that
the heavier object would hit the ground long before the lighter one
In Newton's theory of gravity, everything is attracted
to every other object in the universe
A planet that is following Kepler's Laws, accelerates
toward the sun
Mercury rotates so that its sidereal day lasts for
two thirds of a complete orbit around the Sun