Tag: the earth and the graticule

A natural satellite is any celestial body in space that orbits around a larger body. Moons are called natural satellites because they orbit planets.  

Satellites that are made by people and launched into orbit using rockets are called artificial satellites. There are thousands of artificial satellites orbiting the Earth.

The inner planets, Mercury and Venus have no natural satellites; Earth has one large natural satellite, known as the Moon; and Mars has two tiny natural satellites, Phobos and Deimos.

Other outer planets also have many natural satellites.

This airplane taking off from N30 E50 would have to be a seaplane or floatplane. That location is in the Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran. 

The oblate spheroid, or oblate ellipsoid, is an ellipsoid of revolution obtained by rotating an ellipse about its shorter axis. It is the regular geometric shape that most nearly approximates the shape of the Earth. A spheroid describing the figure of the Earth or other celestial body is called a reference ellipsoid.

The equator represents the 0° latitude. It divides the earth into two hemispheres: Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere. All the parallels north of the equator are called "North latitudes" and all parallels south of the equator are called "South latitudes".

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly behind the Earth into its umbra (shadow). This can occur only when the sun, Earth and moon are aligned (in "syzygy") exactly, or very closely so, with the Earth in the middle. 

• The largest planet in our solar system by far is Jupiter, which beats out all the other planets in both mass and volume. Jupiter's mass is more than 300 times that of Earth, and its diameter, at 140,000 km, is about 11 times Earth's diameter.
  

• The shape of the earth is like an oblate spheroid i.e. a sphere which is a little flatter at the pole. Hence option D is correct. 
• The shape of the earth is also called the geoid shape.