Solar+System+-+Outline

=​Outline of Space Missions=

Part 1: 6-wk Mission
We start off trying to find places in the solar system that could support life. Should we start off with defining life? Is this where you want to start on day one of the course?
 * Big Question: //What makes a cosmic body habitable?//**

Major resource/link: NASA Solar System Exploration web pages: [] This has some wonderful interactive activities. One of the things I did not like was there was no explanation if you got the question wrong or did not understand the concept.

First of all, What is the solar system? What makes it up? And how does it relate to other words about space, such as galaxy and universe?

SS is our star - the Sun - and all the objects that orbit it. Orbit just means to be bound by the Sun's gravity so that as an object moves it can't escape from being near the Sun, just keeps going around and around it, for millions or billions of years.

Everyone learned about the solar system and planets in grade school - do you remember
 * M**y **V**ery **E**ducated **M**other **J**ust **S**erved **U**s **N**ine **P**izzas?

But astronomers decided that Pluto (Pizzas) really isn't a planet like the other 8 so it is now called a dwarf planet, and the mnemonic above for remembering the names of the planets has to be changed. Here is one suggestion:
 * M**y **V**ery **E**ducated **M**other **J**ust **S**erved **U**s **N**oodles.

Surely you can do better than that, and be more up to date! I keep thinking the **N** should stand for **N**intendo - can you make up a planet-remembering sentence that uses Nintendo as the last word? We'll vote on your suggestions!

With this useful trivia behind us fill out this SS census to see what you remember. In the education world this activity is known as a KWL activity and is used to assess prior student knowledge so a teacher knows what needs to be addressed and/or retaught because students had not mastered it.

In 2010 the United States took a census. That is a counting of all the people in the country - about 300 million. But the census only counted people, not dogs, birds, cars or anything else. Lets do a quick census of the SS but include everything.

Table to fill out with with choices for answers.


 * **Body** || **How many?** || **How big (km)** || **Where found?** || **Have you seen one?** ||
 * stars || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions || 1-10s, 100s, 1000s, 100,000s || center || yes, no ||
 * planets || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions || 1-10s, 100s, 1000s, 100,000s || 1-40 AU || yes, no ||
 * moons || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions || 1-10s, 100s, 1000s, 100,000s || around planets || yes, no ||
 * asteroids || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions || 1-10s, 100s, 1000s, 100,000s || between Mars-Jup || yes, no ||
 * comets || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions || 0.1-10s, 100s, 1000s, 100,000s || far away and come near Sun || yes, no ||
 * dust || one, tens, hundreds, thousands, billions, trillions || 0.00001s, 0.0001-0.001, || everywhere || yes, no ||

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ Set: "Show Me" to "The Solar System" "As seen from" to "above" "I want field of view" to "1" degree. Leave everything else in default, but click "extra brightness" and unclick "show all spacecraft". Click "Run Simulator" Repeat this, changing "I want field of view" to "2", then "5", then "10", etc degrees. This steps you through a view of the SS that starts with the planets near the Sun and shows them from progressively further away, so more of the SS is revealed.
 * Action:** Use the Solar System Simulator to see how planets are spaced in the SS.

This doesn't show where comets come from, or how far it is to the next nearest star. Comets come from the Oort cloud at 50,000 AU, and the nearest star is 4 times further than that. Here is a series of diagrams that show those distances: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/stardist.html

Space is mostly empty and our planets are relatively clustered near our star compared to the distance to other stars.

Once we talk about other stars, that gets us into something vastly bigger than the SS, our galaxy. You've seen pictures of the galaxy looking like a swirling pinwheel. It contains about 200 billion stars beside our Sun, and is roughly 50 million times bigger than our solar system.

There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and all of them together make us the universe. When we talk of the solar system we are just concerned with a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of everything in the universe, but its the most important because its where we live, our home, and the basis for understanding anyplace else.

So there is a lot of stuff in our SS, and it has different characteristics. In summary, few big things - 1 star, a handful of planets, and more and more smaller things. We will look in more detail at some of these SS bodies but lets get back to the one we know most about, our planet Earth, and why life can exist there.

(Understand conditions on Earth before looking at other bodies in the solar system.)

__Quest 1: What makes Earth habitable?__ Source of energy Long lasting and stable Triple Point of Water Temperature Distance from Sun Atmosphere Mass Composition Crust Density Atmosphere Water Ozone (and hence Oxygen) Variations thru time Atmosphere change, cratering fall off

Activities: Diameter and Mass of Earth to get density

NASA Resources: Ozone and atmosphere pages

(Understand the physical conditions in the rest of the solar system that relate to habitability.)

__Quest 2: What controls the temperature of a solar system body?__ Planetary Temperatures

__Quest 3: Are all atmospheres the same?__ Which have them, how do we know? Differential rotation Videos of moving spots on Jupiter Compositions? Gases escape re Jeans atmos escape equation (so T and mass)

__Quest 4: Are you building your house on firm ground?__ Hard bodies Impact cratering and volcanism Weather surface features

Activities: Inverse power law Observe the planets with eyeball Diameter, mass, density and rotation rate of Jupiter For each calculation/deduction - so what? What implication?

NASA Resources: