See other posts from April 2012

Test Your Planetary Knowledge and Learn More

Posted By Bruce Betts

2012/04/16 06:30 CDT

Topics: podcasts and videos, events and announcements

If you want to test your planetary knowledge, or just have a masochistic love of tests, I’ve posted the midterm I've given to my students in my online Introductory Astronomy and Planetary Science class at California State University Dominguez Hills. Here you can find the midterm as well as the midterm with answers in a separate file. The midterm covers the inner (terrestrial) planets as well as asteroids, and is based mostly on lectures, with a sprinkling of questions based on the text book.

Also at that link, you can find links to videos of all the classes, and the syllabus. If you check soon you can see the fabulous picture of me that was sampled for the YouTube link, apparently proving one can study magnetic fields better with your eyes closed.

We're working our way out through the solar system. Last class, Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker joined me for a video chat that included methane rain on Titan and a possible close to Saturn scenario for the Cassini end of mission in a few years. Then, I blazed into the Uranian and Neptunian systems. Next week we're covering lots of smaller bodies littering the outer solar system: the Pluto system, Kuiper Belt objects, and comets and the Oort cloud. Join in live, or watch the archive.