Homework Set 3 -- Solutions
DUE: Friday, June 14
Please use a separate piece of paper for your answers
1. LOST IN SPACE ! On your last ski trip to the planet NESPA III, you fall asleep at the controls and crash-land on an unknown planet which you name CU-piter, since you're stuck there. The laws of physics still apply, (they do everywhere-or else they're not really laws ...) but the details of the solar system may be different.
On CU-piter, northern summers are much hotter than southern hemisphere summers.
(a) State a hypothesis for why this might be. (What property of the orbit or tilt might cause this?)
A good hypothesis would be that the planet is in a very elliptical orbit, and that it comes closer to the Sun during the northern winter
(b) Describe one type of observation you could make from the planet of the sun or stars (with telescope or naked eye) and how it would test your hypothesis. There are several possibilities but you need give only one.
You could observe the size of the Sun -- it should be larger during northern summer
2. There are two major kinds of atmospheric circulation patterns on the Earth, both of which were discussed in class. Pick one of these, briefly describe it, and either draw a diagram of it or describe the forces responsible for it.
Hadley Circulation: Hot air rising over the equator, tranporting north and south toward the poles, and subsiding in the high latitudes.
Coriolis Force: Rotation of the Earth causes poleward moving air to be deflected to the East.
3. The Moon consists of two major terrain types. Say what these are, and in each column list at least three differences between them.
Maria Highlands
smooth mountainous
few craters many craters
younger older
4. Describe the current theory of the Giant Impact origin of the Moon, and cite Apollo lunar data to support it.
The Giant Impact theory suggests that a Mars-sized body hit the Earth soon after the formation of the Earth and its core. Mantle material from the Earth was ejected into space, and re-accreted to form the Moon. This explains the age of the Moon (about the same age as the Earth), the composition, since it is similar to the Earth's mantle, and both the lack of iron and water. There is no water because it would have been vaporized and lost during the impact. There is little iron, because it had fallen to the core of the Earth, and was not ejected into space during the impact.