The teaching theme this week is the solar system. While I'm reasonably good with the mechanics of the system, way back when I learned about it (approximately the Jurassic era), things were quite different. For one thing, Pluto was still a planet. So I'm taking some time in this little blog and organizing notes and comments about the planet and some exercises I can do with the class.
Since I have a fairly difficult class (k-2nd grade... which means some of them can read, only one can tie knots, one has ADHD, all have short attention spans) and a fairly challenging class (interested in science, grades 4-5, most have parents who read or are in the tech field) I'm going to look up science activities and factoids for the classes. Some of the factoids I don't have to memorize, since their take-home is a puzzle cube that can be rotated to form pictures of the planets (along with facts about the planets.) This isn't a problem for the older group, but my younger group won't be able to make the cubes for a variety of reasons and many of them won't be able to read the information.
So what makes a planet? It has to have enough gravity to pull it into a round shape, it has to be orbiting the sun (not another planet) and has to have "cleared its orbital path" of other objects. Everything else is something else.
Take "Plutoids," for instance. We have four: Pluto, Eris (formerly known as "Xena"), Makemake, and Haumea. However, there are other celestial objects which meets almost all those requirements but aren't "Plutoids". These include Quaoar, Sedna, (once hailed as the 10th planet), the "asteroid", Ceres, and a newly discovered body called "Orchis." Large enough that it has a rounded shape, it is now classified as a "dwarf planet."
The others are also classified as "Plutinos", a very new classification of Kuyper Body Objects -- objects that orbit twice for every three orbits of Neptunes. And then there's "Centauroids." But explaining this to a pack of elementary school students is going to be mind numbingly dull and terribly complex, so telling them that these are "in an asteroid belt far away beyond Neptune" is the best solution.
So, a game of "how far away is everything" is in order.
Millions of Miles from the Sun:
30.........................Mercury
60.........................Venus
90.........................Earth
140.......................Mars
480......................Jupiter
880......................Saturn
1780....................Uranus
2790....................Neptune
3660....................Pluto
Sedna is three times further away than Pluto!
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Citizen Science -- The Moon Zoo
Citizens, scientists want YOU!
Yes, that's right -- one of the most valuable tools for any scientist is the help of informed and interested people; people who can be places where the scientist isn't and who can provide extra eyes and hands to help with research. Now a newly-launched sister site of Galaxy Zoo is looking for people who are interested in helping scientists search the surface of the Moon.
The Moon Zoo website takes advantage of lessons learned from the very successful Galaxy Zoo website. Researchers placed millions of high resolution images from the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on the website. After going through a series of pages explaining how to classify objects, Moon Zoo asks volunteers to classify and measure different kinds of features found on the moon's surface. Things that they are particularly interested in is the number and size of craters in each area, locating lava channels, crater chains, volcanoes, lava floods from meteor impacts, and boulders found at the edge of impact craters. Moon Zoo volunteers also help identify recent changes on the moon by comparing photos from the Apollo missions and from the LRO cameras. They also hope to locate space mission hardware -- not only the famous Apollo landing modules and Lunar rovers, but European lunar probe mission hardware and probes sent to the moon by the Chinese. To date, over a million images have been processed by volunteers -- less than 6 months' worth of photographs.
For the curious novice, the site has many pages to delight you with fascinating information -- from a page about the Moon's atmosphere (yes, it does have one but it's almost nonexistent: http://www.moonzoo.org/Lunar_Atmosphere) to the Planetary Science page (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/moonpage.html), there's something for everyone here on this site.
And then there are the photos -- confirmed landing sites (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=174.0 -- the hardware is very small, and you have to look closely to really observe one), crater chains (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=107.0) , and more.
The one downside to me is that the Moon is monochromatic for the most part, and I miss some of the beautiful colors of the galaxies in Galaxy Zoo. But there's plenty of interesting photos on both sites and a real need for interested people to learn to classify objects. All in all, it's a great evening hobby for an armchair scientist!
Yes, that's right -- one of the most valuable tools for any scientist is the help of informed and interested people; people who can be places where the scientist isn't and who can provide extra eyes and hands to help with research. Now a newly-launched sister site of Galaxy Zoo is looking for people who are interested in helping scientists search the surface of the Moon.
The Moon Zoo website takes advantage of lessons learned from the very successful Galaxy Zoo website. Researchers placed millions of high resolution images from the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on the website. After going through a series of pages explaining how to classify objects, Moon Zoo asks volunteers to classify and measure different kinds of features found on the moon's surface. Things that they are particularly interested in is the number and size of craters in each area, locating lava channels, crater chains, volcanoes, lava floods from meteor impacts, and boulders found at the edge of impact craters. Moon Zoo volunteers also help identify recent changes on the moon by comparing photos from the Apollo missions and from the LRO cameras. They also hope to locate space mission hardware -- not only the famous Apollo landing modules and Lunar rovers, but European lunar probe mission hardware and probes sent to the moon by the Chinese. To date, over a million images have been processed by volunteers -- less than 6 months' worth of photographs.
For the curious novice, the site has many pages to delight you with fascinating information -- from a page about the Moon's atmosphere (yes, it does have one but it's almost nonexistent: http://www.moonzoo.org/Lunar_Atmosphere) to the Planetary Science page (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/moonpage.html), there's something for everyone here on this site.
And then there are the photos -- confirmed landing sites (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=174.0 -- the hardware is very small, and you have to look closely to really observe one), crater chains (http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=107.0) , and more.
The one downside to me is that the Moon is monochromatic for the most part, and I miss some of the beautiful colors of the galaxies in Galaxy Zoo. But there's plenty of interesting photos on both sites and a real need for interested people to learn to classify objects. All in all, it's a great evening hobby for an armchair scientist!
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