Questions in this quiz: Mercury and Venus

The inner planets beyond Earth. Mercury's cratered surface and extreme temperature swings, Venus's runaway greenhouse, retrograde rotation, dense CO₂ atmosphere, and probes (Mariner, Magellan, MESSENGER, Akatsuki).

1. On Mercury, a solar day (sunrise to sunrise) lasts approximately how long compared to its year? — Options: Half a Mercurian year, One Mercurian year, Two Mercurian years, Four Mercurian years
2. Which feature, discovered by Mariner 10 in 1974, is the largest known impact structure on Mercury? — Options: Caloris Basin, Rembrandt Basin, Rachmaninoff Basin, Beethoven Basin
3. What did MESSENGER confirm about Mercury's permanently shadowed polar craters in 2012? — Options: They contain liquid mercury lakes, They host significant water ice deposits, They emit detectable radio bursts, They contain frozen carbon dioxide only
4. Venus's atmosphere super-rotates, meaning its upper clouds circle the planet far faster than the surface rotates. Roughly how long do these clouds take to circumnavigate Venus? — Options: About 4 Earth days, About 24 Earth hours, About 30 Earth days, About 243 Earth days
5. What is the approximate surface atmospheric pressure on Venus? — Options: About 1 Earth atmosphere, About 10 Earth atmospheres, About 92 Earth atmospheres, About 500 Earth atmospheres
6. Magellan, which mapped 98% of Venus's surface in the early 1990s, used what technique to image through the thick clouds? — Options: Infrared thermal imaging, Ultraviolet spectroscopy, Synthetic aperture radar, Lidar altimetry
7. Most Venusian surface features are named after women, but one major highland region retains a male mythological or historical name. Which is it? — Options: Ishtar Terra, Aphrodite Terra, Maxwell Montes, Lakshmi Planum