Astronomy 1021 Study Guide - Flattening

• School: Western University
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: Astronomy 1021
• Professor: Stacey Hallman

Document Summary

Very expensive: a flyby spacecraft mission comes close to a planet just once, cheaper than other missions but less time to gather data, the voyager 1 spacecraft is still operating and is currently 127 au from the sun, orbiter spacecraft go into orbit around another world, more time to gather data but cannot obtain detailed information about world"s surface. Messenger"s journey to mercury: probes or landers actually land on the surface of another world, sequence: brake, fall, bounce, open, explore, sample return missions land on the surface of another world and bring back samples, combination spacecraft include more than one type, e. g. lander/orbiter, cassini/huygens mission to saturn/titan. The solar system: consists of the sun and those celestial objects that orbit the sun, these objects, 8 planets, 170+ known moons, 5+ dwarf planets, billions of smaller bodies: asteroids, comets, kuiper belt objects, scale: the sun is the size of a grapefruit (14 cm), earth is the size of a ball point,