Page 292 - NS-2 Textbook

ASTRONOMY 287

called Juno is in the plarming stages for launch in 2010. 4. What are some of the things an astronomer must be
A mission called New Horizons launched in Janualy 2006 able to do, besides making celestial observations?
and will fly by Pluto and its moon Charon in 2015. 5. Name and describe the hvo main types of telescopes.
The search for extraterrestrial life in the solar sys- 6. What does a radiotelescope do?
tem and beyond will be an ongoing quest for the fore- 7. Why is a map of the radio sky different from a visual
seeable future. In addition to the investigations of the map?
SETI organization mentioned in this chaptel~ over the 8. What are quasars?
last decade astronomers using both space-based and 9. W11at are pulsars?
terrestrial telescopes have discovered the presence of 10. What is the main advantage of making astronomical
over 150 planets orbiting distant stars. If it could be observations from a high balloon?
shown that the formation of planets is a fairly common 11. When and with what event did the space age begin?
occurrence in the universe, statistics "\vould then indi- 12. What are the three main phases of the study of the
cate that the probability of at least some form of life ex- solar system by spacecraft?
isting elsewhere in our universe is fairly high. Such a 13. W11at kinds of studies have the Explorer series of
discovery would rank among the greatest scientific spacecraft done?
achievements of all time, with great consequences for 14. What was the main work of Skylab in 1973-74?
humankind. III 15. A. What was the mission of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft?
B. Where is it now?
16. A. How many Apollo manned Moon exploration
missions ·were there?
CRITICAL THINKING B. During what period of time did they occur?
17. What important exploratory missions to Venus and
1. Why is the possibility of extraterrestrial life so fasci-
Jupiter were conducted during the 1990s?
nating to most people and especially to astronomers?
18. What new space station is currently being con-
2. Two opposing views of intelligent alien life are given
sh'ucted in Earth's orbit?
in the 1980s movie ET and in films like the Aliell series
and the 2005 version of War of the Worlds. How would
you conceptualize the nahlre of extraterrestrial intelli- Vocabulary
gent life (if any), and why?
observatory radiotelescope
3. Do you think the current level of expenditure on ex-
spacecraft quasars
ploration of the solar system is too little, about right,
space probe pulsars
or too much? Justify your answer.
refracting telescope corona
reflecting telescope telemetry
cosmologist astrophysicist
Study Guide Questions
electromagnetic spectrllln Sputnik I
1. What is an observatory, and what is it used for? spectrograph magnetosphere
2. Where are observatories usually located, and why? radioactivity space station
3. Why are most astronomical photographs made in an SETI extraterrestrial life
observatory recorded on glass photographic plates? Hubble Space Telescope International Space Statioll