Last Atro i think

According to our textbook, what is the best way to defend ourselves against an asteroid which is on course to collide with the Earth in 7 years?

If we do it early enough, we could explode something on or near the asteroid to deflect it slightly, so that years later it would then miss the Earth

The moon Triton orbits which of the planets?

Neptune

The tallest mountain on a terrestrial world is:

Olympus Mons (Mt. Olympus) on Mars

Two small moons in the solar system, known since the 19th century, turn out to be captured asteroids. These two moons are

Phobos and Deimos around Mars

The planet that orbits "on its side" (i.e. has its rotation axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit) is:

Uranus

Which of these worlds is the most active geologically?

Venus

Astronomers estimate that there may be a trillion (a thousand billion) comet nuclei orbiting beyond Pluto. Why then do we not see more comets in our skies?

most comets remain in stable orbits beyond Pluto, only a few have their orbits disturbed and come into the inner solar system

A main difference between asteroids and comets is that asteroids are mostly made of rock and comets are mostly made of

ice

What features are abundant on Callisto and Ganymede and almost absent on Europa and Io?

impact craters

When larger fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 1994,

they exploded in Jupiter s atmosphere, releasing energy equal to millions of megatons of TNT

A key difference between the protoplanets that formed in the outer solar system and those that formed in the inner solar system was that

those in the outer solar system were in a place where ice, not just rock, condensed and thus could grow larger

he spacecraft that visited Pluto and send back our first images:

was called New Horizons (WRONG)

In 2013, a small stony asteroid collided with the Earth above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. What was the result?

A fireball briefly brighter than the Sun could be seen in the sky

The four large moons of Jupiter were first discovered by:

Galileo with his early telescope

The largest and most massive of Saturn's rings is the

B

If everything in the solar system is moving around, why do the Perseid meteors repeat regularly around August 11th or so?

Because the Earth in its orbit intersects the same swarm of meteor particles at the same time each year

The first asteroid to be discovered (which is also the largest one) is called

Ceres

Pluto's big satellite is called

Charon

Pluto was discovered through the patient searching of

Clyde Tombaugh

The largest planet in the solar system (by mass) is

Jupiter

Which of the jovian planets has the shortest period of rotation (the shortest day)?

Jupiter

The telescope in space that allowed astronomers to find thousands of exoplanets and exoplanet candidates by making very careful measurements during a planet transit was called:

Kepler

Between 1992 and today, astronomers using large telescopes have discovered many icy pieces that orbit in the same region as the orbit of Pluto. These are believed to be members of the

Kuiper belt

The comet that broke into more than 20 pieces and then collided with Jupiter in 1994 was

Shoemaker-Levy 9

The typical meteor is:

a small solid particle, no bigger than a pea

If there are at least a million asteroids, how did spacecraft like Galileo survive their trip through the asteroid belt?

although there are many asteroids, they are widely spaced (there is lots of space between them)

Which of the following is NOT a way that the moon Titan probably resembles the Earth?

at its surface the temperature and pressure are just right for water to exist in all three phases (gas, liquid, and ice)

Short-period comets like Comet Halley

come back again and again at predictable intervals

CH11-- By far the most abundant element in the giant (jovian) planets is

hydrogen

When a chunk of cosmic material the size of a golf ball or a baseball hits the Earth s atmosphere it makes a

fireball

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

The first technique that allowed astronomers to find exoplanets involved:

measuring changes in the radial velocity (Doppler shift) of the star caused by the pull of orbiting planets

Astronomers estimate that about 25 million meteors strike the Earth s atmosphere each day. How come we haven t run out of meteors in the long history of the Earth?

meteors are pieces of dirt left over from the formation of our solar system and from old comets; there is a huge supply of small dirt particles from both sources

The lakes found in the north polar region of Titan are filled with liquid

methane

What method was used to discover Pluto in 1929-1930?

take pairs of photographs several days apart and "blink" them

Astronomers now believe that the differences in composition among the planets reflect what characteristic in the early solar system

temperature

Our modern understanding of Pluto is that it is a member of

the Kuiper Belt (of trans-Neptunian objects)

Which of the following does the composition of a planet like Jupiter resemble:

the Sun

One reason that we have such a complex system of belts/zones/storms in Jupiter's atmosphere is that:

the planet rotates very rapidly

Halley's Comet was given that name because Edmond Halley was

the scientist who pointed out that the orbit of the comet was such that it should return every 76 years or so