Structure of the Final Exam

Our final exam will have some questions taken from the midterm, and it will also have new questions from the second half of the quarter.

The overall structure of the exam and the number of questions will be the same as the midterm. The exam will be laid out like this:

True/False: 6 questions, 2 of which will be from the midterm (1 pt. each)

Matching: A new set of 5 matching questions (2 pts. each, for 10 pts. total)

Multiple Choice "General Knowledge": 12 questions, 5 of which will be from the midterm (4 pts. each)

Multiple Choice "Deeper Thought": 6 questions, 2 of which will be from the midterm (5 pts. each)

1 new extra-credit question, probably involving some calculation (7 pts)

Slides: 4 slides, one of which will be recycled from the midterm, along with its questions. Each slide has:

1 True/False question (1 pt.)
2 Multiple-Choice "General Knowledge" questions (4 pts. each)
1 Multiple-Choice "Deeper Thought" question (5 pts.)

So, there will be some questions recycled from the midterm, but most of the questions will be new ones from the second half of the quarter. Here are the things to know for those questions:

Items in boldface type are vocabulary terms and key concepts. They can often be found in either boldface or italics in the textbook.

Chapter 6: Astronomical Instruments

First, recall the three things a telescope does:

Magnify
Gather light
Resolve small details

What are the two basic types of telescope? (See Fig. 6.5)

What is the thing that gets hooked up to a telescope, to sense electromagnetic radiation and record observations?

How does each type of telescope gather light?

That list of three things a telescope does - which of those things is/are influenced by the telescope's aperture, and which is/are influenced by the telescope's focal length? (Figs. 6.4 will help explain focal length.)

What do we call the problem that a refracting telescope has with color? Does a reflecting telescope have this same problem? What were some of the other reasons why astronomers use mirrors instead of lenses to gather light in their telescopes?

Why do some reflecting telescopes have a secondary mirror? If you had an amateur-sized refractor, say with an aperture of about 10 inches (25cm), why wouldn't you put the eyepiece at the prime focus?

How big are the mirrors in the largest telescopes in use today? (This is described in the same part of the text that has a photograph of an `ESO VLT' mirror.) If the E-ELT and the TMT get built as planned, how big will their mirrors be?

What is a telescope's mounting? (This is described as "the steel structure of a telescope" on p. 200 of the PDF edition.) Why would you want to use a very steady, high-precision mounting for your telescope? Why would the apparent diurnal motion of the sky be a problem for an astronomer, and how does the telescope's mounting counteract this effect? (Figs. 6.8 and 6.11 show the mountings of three telescopes. I may have included a video clip in one of the lecture videos, which shows a telescope in Chile moving from target to target, and smoothly tracking each target.)

What are the four things about the Earth's atmosphere that are bad for astronomers? What is light pollution? What is seeing? What do adaptive optics do?

After talking about telescope optics and the limitations of the Earth's atmosphere, Chapter 7 turned to detectors. Here are some things to know about them:

When they say that the human eye suffers from a very short integration time, what does that mean? What advantage would a detector, used by an astronomer, have in this regard?

What advantage does a modern CCD detector have, compared to the old glass plates or photographic films?

What's the big disadvantage that infrared astronomers face? (The textbook made a comparison to a visible-light astronomer trying to work in broad daylight.)

Make sure you remember (and could explain) the three basic things that astronomers do with the electromagnetic radiation that their telescopes gather:

Imaging
Spectroscopy
Photometry

Make sure you understand the basics of how a spectrometer works, as shown in Fig. 6.16.

What part of a radio telescope is similar to the primary mirror of a visible-light telescope? What is the `performance boost' (my term) that comes from building a radio interferometer?

After this, the text discussed observations outside the Earth's atmosphere.

What advantage is there for infrared astronomy, if astronomers put their telescopes in a plane or a spacecraft?

What problem did the Hubble space telescope have when it was launched, and how was this fixed?

Chapter 7: Introduction to the Solar System

Which object in our solar system contains most of the solar system's mass?

Which planets were known to ancient peoples?

Make sure you know the names of the planets, in order outward from the Sun. (This includes both the `classical' planets, visible to ancient people, and the two planets beyond them.)

What are the TNOs? What does this stand for? Which one was the first to be found? What's another name that they use for the largest TNOs, and what's the name of an asteroid that's also in this category?

Carefully study Fig. 7.3, and make sure what we mean when we say that the orbits of the planets are all in (pretty much) the same plane. Do the orbits of the dwarf planets also lie in this plane?

Which planets are the terrestrial planets, and what do they have in common?

Which planets are the Jovian planets, and what do they have in common? (What's another name for the Jovian planets?)

What do we mean by density, and which planet is the densest?

Extra Credit: You might see an extra-credit multiple-choice question about density, like the ones in Example 7.1.

How many moons are known in our solar system? Which two planets don't have moons?

What are the asteroids, and where are they located? What do we think these objects are, in terms of solar-system history?

What are the comets, and what do they have in common with the asteroids? What things are different between the comets and the asteroids?

What's the difference between a meteor and a meteorite?

In the early 1960s, what did astronomer Carl Sagan suggest about the potential habitability of Venus? What did he discover about seasonal changes observed on Mars?

In Section 7.2, a comparison is made between the giant planets and the Sun. What do Jupiter and Saturn have in common with the Sun? Is it really correct to call them gas giant planets? Why?

What is the main difference between Uranus (or Neptune) and Jupiter & Saturn?

What are the two main types of material in a terrestrial planet? Where is each type located, and why are they arranged into these zones? (Hint: What do we call the process by which the terrestrial planets `zoned' themselves internally?)

Many moons in the outer solar system include a large proportion of a material that our Moon doesn't have. What is it?

Toward the end of Section 7.2, the authors talk about the different amounts of geologic activity that different planets have experienced. What basic difference between planetary bodies is responsible for the differences in their levels of geologic activity?

In Section 7.3, we learned about the dating of planetary surfaces. You should make sure that you understand how crater counting can allow us to figure out which parts of a planetary body's surface are older or younger, relative to other parts of the surface.

How does radiometric dating of rocks work? (This is described in the section on "Radioactive Rocks". Make sure you understand what a half-life is, and how the amount of a radioactive substance decreases as time goes by. You can see this depicted in a graph in Fig. 7.16.)

What was the solar nebula, and how were the planets built up from planetesimals?

Chapter 8: Earth as a Planet

What is the main difference between Earth's composition and that of the Sun and other stars?

What allows geoscientists to `probe' the interior of the Earth?

Make sure you know the major layers of the Earth, as shown in Fig. 8.3. (Note that they've incorrectly labeled the outer core as just `core'. In a lecture video, I probably mentioned the difference between the outer and inner parts of the core - what is it?)

Which type of rock are the Earth's ocean floors made of? How about the continents?

What causes the Earth to have a magnetic field? What is the magnetosphere? What effect does the solar wind have on the magnetosphere? (This is shown in Fig. 8.5)

The textbook describes plate tectonics, and I described this in a lecture video. Here are some specific things to know:

What are the differences between convergent and divergent plate boundaries?
At which type of boundary is plate material created?
Which type consumes plate material?
What do we call the type of plate boundary that the San Andreas fault is an example of? (I had this term on a written page that I showed in a lecture video, but it's not listed in the textbook.)

What are the two main gases that the Earth's atmosphere is made of?

Why doesn't the Earth have many impact craters on its surface?

What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, how long ago did this happen, and where is the site where the extinction-causing event happened?

Chapter 9: Cratered Worlds (= Moon and Mercury)

In the "Thinking Ahead" section at the beginning of this chapter, the authors give four similarities between the Moon and Mercury. Because of these similarities, the two objects are discussed in the same chapter. What are these four similarities?

What is the surface gravity on the Moon, compared to that at the Earth's surface?

Does the Moon have more or less of a stock of volatiles than the Earth does? What are `volatiles'?

The section on "Exploration of the Moon" describes the missions to the Moon, including the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s. Here are some facts to know about Apollo:

How many Apollo missions went to the vicinity of the Moon?
How many people walked on the lunar surface?
What year was the first Apollo landing?
What year was the last Apollo landing?
Which mission had a geologist as a crew member?

Let's compare the Moon to the Earth: What is a major part of the Earth's interior that is essentially mission from the Moon's interior? Carefully note the sentence that begins "It is as if the Moon were composed of…". What two things appear almost to have been "selectively removed" ?

What's been found inside some craters near the Moon's poles?

Here's an important thing to know about the Moon, which I emphasized in a lecture video: What are the differences between the maria and the highlands? Here are the specifics to know:

Which is smoother, which one is rougher?
Which is high-standing, which type is located at lower elevations?
What type of rock makes up each type of surface?
Which one is light-colored, which one is dark-colored?
Which surface is younger, which surface is older? (Hint: This comes from the basic principle of `dating planetary surfaces' that we learned in Chapter 7.)

What is the relationship between maria and impact basins? (Fig. 9.11 shows an impact basin that's about 1000km in diameter.)

How long does a day last on the Moon, and how long does a night last?

In a lecture video, I listed a third type of rock that's common on the Moon. What's it called, and how does it form?

Make sure you understand how the cratering process works. This is shown in Fig. 9.14, and described in the paragraphs before and after this figure.

Why are nearly all lunar craters round? What is ejecta, and what are crater rays?

The section on "Using Crater Counts", and Fig. 9.19, talk about something called the "heavy bombardment". This happened earlier than how long ago?

Make sure you're clear on the Giant Impact Hypothesis. How might such an event have worked, to form the Moon? What is the evidence for this event?

Next, in Section 9.5, we learned about Mercury:

What's so different about Mercury, compared to the other terrestrial planetary bodies? (See Fig. 9.20)

How did astronomers figure out that Mercury doesn't rotate in the same amount of time that it takes to orbit the Sun?

In class, you probably copied down a diagram showing the "3:2 spin-orbit resonance" of Mercury. Even though you won't have to re-draw this diagram on the test, it would be really helpful for your knowledge of Mercury if you could. How long (e.g. in Mercury years) would a person on Mercury have to wait, if they wanted to experience one day?

What are Mercury's lobate scarps, and what do they suggest about the size of Mercury's crust through time?

Chapter 10: Earthlike Planets: Venus and Mars

How does Venus compare to the Earth in terms of size, mass, and distance from the Sun?

What is the rotation period of Venus? What does it mean that Venus's rotation is retrograde? How do astronomers determine the rotation period?

Why can't we see the surface of Venus from the Earth? How do spacecraft `see' the surface?

Why do they often make pictures of Venus' surface look orange, such as in Fig. 10.11?

About 75% of the surface of Venus consists of what type of terrain? What was the most common type of rock discovered by the Venera landers on Venus?

What are the names of the two continent-like highlands on Venus, and where is each one located? One of them has a mountain range, the highest on Venus.

Does Venus have Earth-style plate tectonics? What features of Venus's surface are similar to the Earth's major tectonic features? What is a corona, and how does the textbook describe the formation of a corona?

What did the distribution of craters on Venus's surface tell us about the `resurfacing' of the surface? When did this happen, and what kind of material `resurfaced' the planet?

Next, it was on to Venus's atmosphere, which is so different from the Earth's...

What is Venus's atmosphere made of? What are its clouds made of? What are the temperature and pressure at its surface? Would this be a good environment for Earth-like life, and why or why not?

What is the greenhouse effect, and how does it work? (We probably made a sketch showing how this works, in class. Make sure you're clear on the roles that visible light, the planet's surface, infrared radiation, and greenhouse gases play.

Why doesn't the Earth have as strong of a greenhouse effect as Venus? Where (and in what form) is most of the Earth's CO₂?

Next, Mars...

What was the first successful orbiter at Mars, and when did it go into orbit? When did the Viking spacecraft land, and what did their life-detecting experiments find?

How do the size and mass of Mars compare to the size and mass of the Earth?

Even though no spacecraft have returned samples from Mars yet, how is it that scientists have some Martian samples in their laboratory? What kind of rock are they mostly made of? How do we know they're from Mars?

In a lecture video, I probably talked about the concept of an opposition of Mars. What is an opposition, and why is it the best time for observers using ground-based telescopes to study Mars?

When the first telescopic observations were made of Mars, how did a mis-translation of the Italian word canale lead to fanciful ideas about intelligent life on Mars?

What's the big difference between the southern half of Mars and the northern half? (How do they look different? What does this tell us about their ages and histories?) Figure 10.17 will be helpful here.

What's the Tharsis bulge? What are the big, spectacular things on it? What's the name of the biggest and highest of these `things'? How are these things different from their Earthly counterparts? Why do planetary scientists think that at least one of them might still be active?

What's the Valles Marineris? How does it compare to something like the Grand Canyon? The Grand Canyon was carved by flowing water---was the Valles Marineris carved the same way?

Now, on to the Martian atmosphere...

What is the atmosphere of Mars mostly made of? How do the atmospheric pressure and temperature at Mars's surface compare to those of the Earth?

How do images taken from orbit show that the Martian wind can move sediment? (See Fig. 10.23)

How do the atmospheric conditions at Mars's surface affect the possibility of liquid water existing there?

Figure 10.22 shows water frost on the surface of Mars. Is this the only kind of frost that can exist on Mars? If not, how would another type of frost form?

What other factors make it tricky for life to exist at Mars's surface? (Such a list may have shown up in a lecture video.)

What gives Mars its reddish color? How is this related to the abundance (or lack) of oxygen in the atmosphere?

The exploration of Mars by spacecraft has taught us a lot about water on Mars, and under its surface. Here are some specific things to know:

What are the two substances that make up the polar caps of Mars? Why is one of them permanent, while the other one is not?

Why might the northern part of Mars's surface be a good candidate for the site of a possible ancient ocean?

What did the Phoenix spacecraft discover in a shallow trench that it dug?

What is the difference between the runoff channels (which I may have called valley networks) and the outflow channels? What do the gullies suggest?

Extra Credit: In Example 10.1, they show how to compare the amount of water present on two planetary bodies. You might get an extra-credit question in which you have to compare the Earth's amount of water with that of some other planetary body, the way they did it for the Martian polar caps in Example 10.1.

What evidence is there for ice on (and just below) the surface of Mars at the present time?

What evidence did the Mars Exploration Rovers (particularly the `Opportunity' rover) find to support the idea that some rocks on Mars were deposited in water?

When the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft re-photographed the "Face on Mars" hill in 1998, what did it show? Did the hill look more face-like, or less? (See Fig. 10.31)

Chapter 11: The Giant Planets

This chapter takes the four large outer planets and compares and contrasts them to each other, and to the inner planets. What are the four outer planets?

Which planets - `terrestrial' or `giant' - hold most of the mass of the planetary system?

Make sure you're clear on the three kinds of materials that the giant planets are made of. What are the two main gases? What are three common ices? (Are these ices always in a solid state, inside the giant planets?)

Why are Uranus and Neptune called the `ice giants'?

What were the four spacecraft that first visited Jupiter and Saturn? Which spacecraft visited Uranus and Neptune? Which one orbited Jupiter and dropped a probe into its atmosphere? Which one orbited Saturn?

How do the densities of each of the giant planets compare to the density of the Earth? Which one of them is less dense than water?

Now let's think about seasons on the giant planets. Why doesn't Jupiter experience much in the way of seasons? What are seasons like for Saturn and Neptune? Make sure you're familiar with the bizarre axial tilt and seasons of Uranus. (Studying Fig. 11.6 will be worthwhile here.)

Now for composition: Is it really correct to call Jupiter and Saturn gas giants? What are their interiors mostly made of?

What is liquid metallic hydrogen? Which two planets have it in their interiors?

Which two giant planets have a lot of heat coming out of their interiors? What is the source of this heat?

Do the giant planets have magnetic fields like the Earth? Which one has the most intense magnetic field, and the most intense radiation belts? Would it be a good idea for you to fly into these radiation belts?

What are the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn mostly made of? What are two other gases that were detected in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn? Are these gases found in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune as well?

What is photochemistry? Why is this significant for the atmosphere of a planet like Jupiter? What makes the light `zones' in Jupiter's atmosphere look light-colored?

What is the Great Red Spot?

Chapter 12: Rings, Moons, and Pluto

You don't have to know all of the moons of the outer solar system, but here are some specific facts to know:

What are the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, in order outward from the planet?
What's the name of Saturn's largest moon?
What's the name of Neptune's large moon?
What the name of Pluto's moon?
What's the difference between a direct orbit and a retrograde orbit?

Jupiter and Saturn have many small moons - how did they probably get them?

Now for four of the stars of the show: The Galilean moons of Jupiter. Make sure you could recognize an image of any of these four moons.

Let's start with Callisto:

What is it mostly made of?
Is the surface young or old, and how do we know?
Is it differentiated like the Earth?
Has Callisto experienced much geologic activity during the past 4 billion years?

Next, Ganymede:

It's bigger than which planet?
How do we know that it's had some geological activity during its history?
What is something Ganymede has in common with the Earth, that suggests a partially-molten interior?

Now for Europa:

Europa is covered with ice, but it's not mostly made of ice. Why not?
How do we know that Europa's surface is very young?
What is the evidence for a global subsurface ocean on Europa?
What is so exciting about the discovery of (likely) subsurface water on Europa?

Finally, we get to Io:

How does Io's level of volcanism compare to that of other planetary bodies like the Earth?
Is Io's lava similar to the Earth's lava, and if so, how?
What causes the yellow and orange colors on Io's surface?

A really important thing to understand is the concept of tidal heating. Make sure to study the "Tidal Heating" section in detail.

Next the textbook dealt with Titan, a large moon of Saturn:

What makes Titan different from any of the other moons in the solar system?
How does the atmospheric pressure at its surface compare to the Earth's? How about temperature?
What produces the organic molecules in Titan's atmosphere? What is the atmosphere mostly made of?
What is the evidence for liquid on the surface of Titan? What kind of liquid is this? (I went over Titan, its surface, and the liquid in a fair amount of detail in a lecture video.)

After Titan, the text went to Neptune, to deal with its large moon Triton. (Make sure not to get those names mixed up.)

Is Triton mostly rock, or mostly ice?
Why is its surface so cold?
What is its surface made of?
What is the `Tritonian' equivalent of lava?*
What is the evidence for volcanic-like activity on Triton? (See Fig. 12.16)

After the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, Chapter 12 dealt with Pluto.

How did Clyde Tombaugh discover Pluto? (Understanding Fig. 12.17 would be useful here.)

How do the sizes of Pluto and Charon compare to the Earth? (See Fig. 12.18)

Pluto is a dwarf planet - what's the name of another Trans-Neptunian dwarf planet that's about the same size as Pluto? How about one in the asteroid belt?

What kind of material makes up the surface of Pluto?

Does Pluto have an atmosphere? (Hint: Study Fig. 12.20)

What are the `Sputnik Plains' made of? How has this material behaved, so as to remind us of Earthly glaciers?

What are the mountains in and around Sputnik Planum made of?

How do we know the rings of Saturn can't be solid disks? (We may have gone over this in class.)

What are planetary rings really made of?

Make sure you understand what the Roche limit is (the book calls it the tidal stability limit), and how it applies to things like the breakup hypothesis for the formation of a ring system.

What forms Saturn's E Ring? How is this related to the moon Enceladus? How does this compare to Jupiter's moon Europa?

How are Uranus's rings different from those of Saturn? How were they discovered? How do Neptune's rings differ from both of these?

Chapter 13: Comets and Asteroids: Debris of the Solar System

Where are most of the asteroids found?

Which asteroid is the largest one?

Make sure you carefully read the "Composition and Classification" portion of Section 13.1. Here are some specific things to know:

When astronomers examine asteroids, what specifically do they study, in order to classify them into groups.

What are the names of the three major groups of asteroid types?

What are the basic characteristics of each group - how do the groups differ from one another?

Some asteroids are made of metal. Which one of these is the largest, and how do we know it's metallic?

Which group of asteroids has changed the least since the formation of the solar system?

Next, Chapter 13 discussed Vesta, one of the larger asteroids. What's distinctive about its brightness?

What is the special relationship between Vesta and a group of meteorites? In a lecture video, I talked about the Dawn mission - did this tend to confirm or disprove the hypothesis about Vesta and these meteorites?

Are the small asteroids (like Mathilde, Gaspra, and Ida) spherical, like planets? Why or why not?

What is the relationship between Mars's moons and the asteroid belt?

If you compared images of the asteroids Eros and Itokawa, what's very different about their surfaces?

When the Dawn mission visited Ceres, it observed bright spots in places like Occator crater. What are these bright spots made of? Going a bit beyond what's described in the textbook, what might that imply about the interior of Ceres? (Hint: Think of some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.)

If you're looking at a comet, what (if anything) does the tail tell you about its direction of motion? What causes the tail of a comet, anyway? (Figs. 13.18 and 13.22 will be useful here.)

What are the coma and nucleus of a comet? (See Fig. 13.18) How do the coma and tail form, and why do they form when the comet is near perihelion?

What is a comet made of? How is this different from an asteroid?

Where do comets come from in our solar system? Make sure you're clear on the differences between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud.

What has the Rosetta mission discovered about comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko? How do we know that 67P's nucleus is highly porous? What did the `isotopic analysis of deuterium' tell us about the relationship between comets and the Earth's water?

Chapter 14: Cosmic Samples and the Origin of the Solar System

What are differences between a meteoroid, a meteor, and a meteorite?

What's happening when we see a meteor shower from the surface of the Earth? What is a meteor shower's radiant?

Make sure you're clear on the main categories of meteorites: Irons, stones, and stony-irons. Also be clear on what a chondrite is, and the difference between a primitive meteorite and a differentiated meteorite.

What did the Murchison meteorite tell us about the possible source of some of the early building blocks of life on the Earth?

Next, Chapter 14 discussed the origin of the solar system:

What are the three constraints on any theory of the solar system's origin?

Make sure you understand - and could explain- the nebular theory for the solar system's origin. It will be a good idea to closely study the section on "The Solar Nebula" in Section 14.3. Know the steps shown in Fig. 14.11. Also make sure you understand what Fig. 14.12 is showing. How does this show us the reason why the inner planets are made of rock and metal, and the outer ones are made of light elements and ices?

What do the terms accretion, planetesimals, protoplanets, and differentiation mean? What is the relationship between differentiation and the layers of a planet like the Earth?

How do images like Fig. 14.14 and Fig. 14.15 suggest that the nebular theory is at least partially correct?

Study Fig. 14.16 and its caption - How does this show that our solar system is actually not typical?