Students compare real-time Earth and Mars measurements for temperature, wind speed, humidity and atmospheric pressure by accessing Internet-data resources from NASA.
Students become familiar with lunar phases by locating and then graphing the Moon phase of their own birthdays. After listening and discussing lunar myths and legends they create their own Birthday Moon Stories.
In this activity, students download NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the Martian polar ice caps in summer and winter. Using image processing techniques, students measure and compare various images of the changing Martian and Earth polar ice caps.
In this activity, learners use the concepts of greater than, less than, and equal to, in order to classify student height, object size, and planet size. They will build scale models of the planets based on their discoveries of planet size. In the extension, advanced learners download images of the planets and use NIH Image to identify and describe their size by comparing them to one another.
This activity is designed to help middle school students understand that planets travel in nearly circular orbits around the sun, and that planetary motion obeys laws defined by Kepler and Newton. Students will explore interactive web sites demonstrating orbital motion and complete a series of modeling activities.
In this step-by-step tutorial, students will learn to use computer image processing techniques to measure the size of Earth's polar ice caps and analyze various phenomena visible on planetary images. These skills can be used to scale and analyze any image of our Sun, the planets, or any other electronic image found on the Internet.
By using these activities, K-4 students will have the concrete experiences of observing, organizing, comparing, and describing the movement of objects that they observe in the sky. Students will also learn how early cultures viewed objects in the sky and created stories to explain the objects they observed. Then, students will create their own stories to explain their own observations.
In this middle-school level activity, students work as NASA scientists to make repeated observations of our Sun and the planets to determine their rotation rates. First, students create a playground model of rotation and create representative diagrams. Students then observe NASA images of sunspots to determine the rotation rate of our Sun. In the last phase, students download NASA movies from the Internet and measure rotation rates for objects in the solar system.
