Astronomy final
The dark side of the Moon, where the Sun never shines,
(does not exist.
Call the time it takes Venus to orbit the Sun a ìVenusian year.î Call the time it takes Venus to rotate once on its axis relative to the distant stars a ìVenusian sidereal day.îWhich of the following statements about these two time periods is true?
A Venusian year is shorter than a Venusian sidereal day
Which of the following planets has no magnetic Öeld of any kind?
Venus
A model in which the Moon forms from the same rotating cloud of gas and dust as the Earth would predict that the Moonís orbit should be
(in the plane of the Earthís equator
An ion rocket engine produces 1 Newton of thrust. What acceleration can it give to a space probe with a mass of 1000kg?
0.001 m/s2
The angle between the rotation axis of a planet and the perpendicular to the plane of its orbit is called its ìaxial tilt.îThe axial tilt of Mercury is
0.01 degrees.
Suppose that you lift an object by exerting an upward force of 20 Newtons on it. If gravity exerts a force of 10 Newtons downward on the object, what is the total force on the object?
10 Newtons upward
The density of water is 1000kg/m3 , the density of rock is about 3000kg/m3 , and the density of iron is 7800kg/m3 . Which of the following densities is closest to the average density of Jupiter?
1200kg/m3
The first successful soft landing on the Moon was Surveyor 1 in
1966
What total force will cause an object with a mass of 10kg to gain 5 meters per second every second?
50 newtons
Which of the following types of objects include things that could reasonably be described as ìáying rocksî or, for the larger ones, ìáying mountains?î
Asteroids
Which of the following planets or moons has an atmosphere whose temperature and pressure permit all three forms of water?
Earth
Which of the following objects has no magnetic field at all?
Earths moon
Suppose that you drop two objects from the same height at the same time. Both objects are heavy enough to be una§ected by air resistance and one object is twice as heavy. Who predicted that both objects would hit the ground at the same time?
Galileo
Which of the following objects has no overall magnetic field except for small regions due to magnetized ore deposits?
Mars
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 these sequences places the inner planets in the correct order from the Sun, from the closest to the farthest?
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars (farthest)
Which of these Mars rovers has been operating on the surface of Mars for fourteen years so far (as of 2018)?
Opportunity
Why donít we just shoot all of our really nasty waste products into the Sun where they could not possibly bother anyone?
The Sun is actually the hardest part of the Solar System to get to from here
The capture theory, in which our Moon forms separately and is captured by the Earth, became popular when computer models showed that such a capture would have been possible.
The capture theory was dropped because it predicts that the Moon should have hydrated rocks and it does not.
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 áoor of the elevator exerts on you and the force that you exert on the áoor of the elevator
It is expected that a normal Jovian planet, with no accidental encounters that could add or subtract moons, should have
a family of moons, all orbiting in the plane of the planets equator.
The surface magnetic field of Mercury is
about 1% of the Earths magnetic field
The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is
about 1% the surface pressure of Earths atmosphere
So far (as of 2008), the planet Venus has been visited by
about 26 successful space probes.
Venus has
an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with about 90 times the surface pressure of Earths
Once its rockets have ceased firing, an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile will follow a path that is best described as a
an ellipse with the center of the Earth at one focus
Hydrated minerals on the Moon
are almost completely absent
Our Sun sends out intense streams of charged particle radiation. Most of these charged particles
are trapped by the Earthís magnetic Öeld for a while and then strike the atmosphere over the poles.
On the present surface of Mars, water has been confirmed to exist
as ice at the poles and water vapor in the atmosphere
At present (within the last few hundred years), the distance from the Earth to the Sun
changes enough to make the intensity of sunlight vary by 6 percent
When a space probe uses a gravitational slingshot maneuver, it
comes close to a planet to change the probeís speed and direction.
Relative to the distant stars, Mercury
completes 1.5 rotations each time it orbits the Sun.
The discovery that there is water ice on the Moon has motivated many nations to launch Moon missions because it
could make a Moon base possible.
The impacts of large objects on the surface of the Moon have caused
craters
Newtons Universal Law of Gravity explains all but one of the following things. Which one?
how the Sun shines
If the acceleration of an object is zero, its speed
is not changing.
The gravitational attraction of the Earth for other objects
is smaller for objects farther from the Earth but never vanishes entirely
According to the Law of Inertia, a moving object that feels no outside force will
keep moving.
The dark markings on the Full Moon that make up the face of the îMan in the Moon are called Lunar
maria
The Earthís Moon is about 1/4 the size of the Earth. When compared to other planets and their moons, the Earthís Moon is
much larger than we would expect
The distance from the Earth to the Sun is
one astronomical unit
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.
In Keplers Laws of planetary motion the Earth moves around a Sun that is fixed in space. In Newtons theory
the Sun and Earth move around a common center of mass
If you are told that a 20 kilogram object is raised by 10 meters, you know that
the mass of the object is 20 kilograms.
Viking 1 and 2 were sent to explore
the planet Mars.
Suppose that you drop a solid iron ball and a hollow iron ball, both the exact same diameter, from the same height at the same time. Aristotle would predict that
the solid ball would hit the ground long before the hollow ball
The acceleration of Earthís Moon relative to the Earth is
toward the Earth
The distance from the Earth to the Moon
varies enough that sometimes we get an annular solar eclipse.)
