Why Has NASA Sent Recent Orbiters to Mars on Trajectories

question 70

Multiple Choice

Why has NASA sent recent orbiters to Mars on trajectories that required them to skim through Mars's atmosphere ("aerobraking") before settling into their final orbits?

• A)It saved money because the spacecraft used atmospheric drag to slow down rather than needing to carry enough fuel to slow by firing rocket engines.
• B)It allowed the orbiters to get higher resolution pictures of the surface as it came close when skimming through the atmosphere.
• C)It allowed the spacecraft to collect samples of the atmospheric gas for return to Earth.
• D)Each spacecraft also carried a lander,and the lander could only be dropped to the Martian surface when the spacecraft passed through the atmosphere.

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Definitions:

Standard Deviation

A measure of the dispersion or variability of a set of data points around the mean, indicating how spread out the data points are.

SPSS

Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, a software package used for data management and statistical analysis.

T Test

A statistical test used to compare the means of two groups and determine if they are significantly different from each other.

T Statistic

A type of statistic used in hypothesis testing, especially for small sample sizes, calculated to compare an observed sample mean to a theoretical population mean.