synopsis

key concepts

before you visit

background

how do we know?

back in the classroom

connections to other museum halls

correlation to the national standards

credits

supplements

our sun: living with a variable star

near-earth asteroids

glossary

back in the classroom

These activities will help your students to explore and extend their understanding of the dynamic forces at work in the evolving universe.

Elementary and Middle school:

Describe your journey through space: Ask students to write an article for the school newspaper about their trip to the Hayden Planetarium. How many different kinds of collisions did they observe? What was the highlight of the show, and why?

Make a solar wind sprinkler: Students use a milk carton, nails, water, and string to model the way solar wind is twisted into a spiral by the Sun's rotation. The activity is described at http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov/product/genesis_kids/
science_activities/SpinSprinklerSA.html.

Solar burps: A coronal mass ejection stretches the Sun's magnetic field. Using a balloon, to represent the magnetic field, and glitter to represent charged plasma, students find out what happens when the field breaks free from the surface of the Sun. Find instructions at http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/activity/l8.pdf.

Middle and High school:

Catch a shooting star! Meteor showers happen on a regular basis, and they're spectacular. Here's information on where to go and when to look:

• http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/meteor.html
  
• http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/
  solarsystem/meteors/Showers.html
  
• http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/
  22jul_perseids2005.htm
  

Aurora watch: When was the last time auroras could be seen where you live? Ask students to go to http://www.spaceweather.com/ for information and predictions. (They can sign up for email alerts.)

Discuss your trip through space: Write five categories on the board: Earth, Sun, Solar System, galaxy, and universe. Have students list the collisions they observed during the Space Show, and match them to these categories based on the scale on which they occur. Follow up with a discussion about what they learned, and what new information surprised them the most. What was a highlight?

What does it take to get fusion going? Nuclear fusion is a fundamental force in the universe. Have students visit the website below to simulate conditions under which nuclear fusion occurs in the Sun. http://www.astro.ubc.ca/~scharein/a311/Sim/fusion/Fusion.html

Impacts in our lifetime: Large impacts are rare, but they do happen. On the blackboard, write out the Asteroid Impact Odds events (found on the "Near-Earth Asteroids" insert in this guide) in random order and ask students to rank them from least to most probable. Compare their results to the chart. Then ask students to research notable collisions in the Solar System that have occurred in the last century (Tunguska, Peekskill, Shoemaker-Levy 9). Did they come across any near misses?

Soda bottle magnetometer: This website show how students can use a soda bottle and bar magnet to build and operate a simple magneometer (http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/workbook/magnet.html). They can use it to measure changes in Earth's magnetic field and to study magnetic storms.

Mission Mitigation! Astrophysicists at NASA and around the world are busy developing strategies to avert or mitigate the effect of an asteroid colliding with Earth. Ask students to come up with plans of their own. What issues — technological, social, political, and economic — do they have to keep in mind?