Edexcel GCSE Astronomy Topic 11 Exploring the Solar System overview quiz quiz

Nucleus, coma and tails

A solid crust, a rocky mantle and an iron core

A distinct head, a long body and a single tail

Bright rings, small moons and dark cloud bands

Behind the comet along its orbit

Away from the Sun

Towards the Sun

Straight down

The Oort Cloud

The asteroid belt

The Kuiper Belt

The Sun

The Kuiper Belt

The Sun's corona

Jupiter's moons

The Oort Cloud

Passes close to the target once without stopping

Touches down and lands gently on the target's surface

Settles into a stable orbit and circles the target

Deliberately crashes straight into the target's surface

A fly-by

A lander

An orbiter

An impactor

To settle into a low circular orbit around the Earth

To avoid burning up as it passes through the Earth's upper atmosphere

To escape the Earth's gravity, which only rockets can achieve

To slow itself down on the way out to its target

They make far better decisions than human astronauts can

They are always faster at reaching the distant target

They need much more life support than a crewed mission

They are cheaper and risk no human lives

Landing astronauts on the Moon

Sending the first robotic probe out to Pluto

Building the first permanently crewed space station

Landing the first astronauts on the surface of Mars

The total mass of the planet Venus itself

The astronomical unit (the scale of the Solar System)

The age of the Sun since it first formed

The distance from the Earth out to the very nearest star

They are the same thing, just known by two different names

The Kuiper Belt is a spherical shell, while the Oort Cloud is a flat disc near Neptune

The Kuiper Belt is a disc beyond Neptune; the Oort Cloud is a distant spherical shell

Both of them lie well inside the orbit of the planet Mars