Resources for students (still under construction)

Data for individual problems

• Problems 8.1 and 8.4, and one of the Exercises, require you to use data from Table 8.4 in the text, and to compare your results to those that table. The data from this table are available here. In order to make it easy to import these data into your graphing programme, all the headings and other text have been removed from this table. The order of the columns is the same as in the table printed in the textbook.

• We have started to provide hints and answers to some of the exercises that are embedded in the text. (This project is still far from done!)

Making graphs

• Several of the problems require construction of graphs which display data and/or computed curves. If you have access to a computer with Microsoft Excel, you can use this programme to make such graphs. A write-up explaining the elementary steps for making graphs with Excel is available here.

• Microsoft Excel is not a very convenient tool to use for making science graphs. A much more powerful and flexible graphing environment is available if you have access to a computer with Matlab on it. An introduction to graphing with Matlab is available here.

• If you have a Linux operating system on your computer, you should consider installing Grace, a free and extremely powerful graphing tool. Many of the graphs for the text were created with this programme.

Links to interesting Web sites

A number of Web sites offer interesting supplementary material on topics covered in the text. However, such sites tend to appear and disappear, or to change address, frequently enough that a printed list soon goes out of date. Some useful links are listed below. Please let us know at the e-mail below if any of these do not work.

• NASA's Web site provides links to images, videos, downloads, and much more.

• Many images of planets are available from the Planetary Photojournal, created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

• A site with a lot of interesting information about eclipses is Espenak's eclipse home page. Look here for particulars of upcoming eclipses.

• Information about extra-solar planets is available from Schneider's Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia.

• Several important space missions are currently active, or have recently finished. Here are links to a few of them:

  • Comet Borrelly was recently photographed by the NASA Deep Space 1 space craft.

  • The first look inside a comet was provided by the NASA Deep Impact space mission, which launched a projectile at comet Tempel 1 and then studied the debris released by the impact.

  • The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta mission is slowly making its way to a rendevous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which it will study at length after the two meet - in the year 2014!

  • Mars is currently being observed from orbit by several successful orbitting missions, including NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey (and soon the recently launched Mars Reconnaissance Orbitter), as well as the spactacularly successful rovers Spirit and Opportunity, all of which can be checked our from NASA's Mars home page. This page also provides a link to the European Space Agency's Mars Express.

  • The joint NASA-ESA probe to Saturn and its moons, Cassini-Huygens, arrived at the Saturn system in July 2004. This mission includes both an orbitter and a probe that was dropped onto the surface of the huge moon Titan.

  • The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency has developed and launched the Hayabusa mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, collect a sample of surface material, and return it to Earth in the summer of 2007. This mission is already returning close-up images of the asteroid.

Keenan & Darlington, Publishers
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Last modified: 2005 Aug 14