Space for Schools: Florida

Show the tracker at the start of the day and find Florida on the bright side. Where is it night right now? When it is night here, will it be day somewhere else? Look again before home time: how far has the dark side moved?

Spin the live Moon on the board and ask who has ever seen the Moon in daylight. On the next clear morning, look for it together from the playground. Draw where it was and what shape it had.

Ask the class to guess how many stars they could see on a dark night. Use the guide to sort a star, a planet, a plane and the ISS. Why does the Sun look like a disk when other stars look like dots? Grade 4: why is Orion an evening sight in winter but not in summer?

Spin the live Sun. Make two lists: how the Sun helps us (light, warmth, food for plants) and how it can hurt us (sunburn, eye damage). Finish with the one rule that matters most: never look straight at the Sun.

Pass round a magnifier and look at a coin. Then open the telescope page: which telescopes are in space right now, and what can they see that we cannot? Compare a photo of the night sky with a telescope picture of the same patch.

Drop a ball and ask what pulled it down. Nothing touched it! Spin the Moon globe: a ball dropped there falls too, but more slowly. Why do astronauts on the Moon seem to bounce when they walk?

Find the line between day and night on the tracker. Which way is it moving? Connect that to the Sun rising in the east. Then use the sheet: astronauts see about 16 sunrises a day because the station goes round the Earth much faster than the Earth spins.

Read tonight's phase and how much of the Moon is lit. Each student draws it, then draws a guess for one week from today. Keep the Moon diary for seven nights and check the guesses.

Read the launches from Florida at the top of this page and count this week's. Brainstorm the jobs one launch needs (engineers, weather forecasters, crane operators, hotel staff for visitors) and report back as a two-minute news bulletin.

Open the live map. Find Earth, then name its neighbors on each side. Sort what you see into Sun, planets, moons, asteroids and comets. Which spacecraft is farthest from Earth today?

Spin the live Mars globe and list what you see: craters, volcanoes, ice caps. Is Mars an inner or an outer planet? Give two ways the outer planets are different.

Find the next close approach. How big is the object, and how far away will it pass? Compare that distance with the distance to the Moon (about 384,000 km).

Look at a telescope picture of another galaxy and spot the stars, the dark dust and the glowing gas. Our whole solar system sits inside a galaxy like this one: where in it might we be?

Read how long a signal takes to reach Voyager 1 today. Light reaches us from the Moon in about 1.3 seconds and from the Sun in about 8 minutes. How long would light take to cross the whole Milky Way? (About 100,000 years.)

Show a deep-field picture from a space telescope. Count the galaxies in one small square, then scale up: the whole picture covers a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. What does that suggest about the whole sky?

A 50 kg student has the same mass everywhere. Work out their weight on Earth (9.8 N/kg), the Moon (1.6 N/kg) and Mars (3.7 N/kg). Then compare each world's distance from the Sun and its air.

Check today's phase on the live Moon. Is it near new Moon or full Moon? Predict whether this week's tides on the Florida coast will be larger (spring) or smaller (neap) than usual, and say why.

Find the next eclipse visible from Florida. Is it solar or lunar? Draw the Sun, Earth and Moon lined up for it. The Moon's orbit is tilted by about 5 degrees: use that to explain why most full Moons miss Earth's shadow.

Spin the live Sun and look for dark sunspots. Track one over a few days: it moves across the disk because the Sun turns, about once every 27 days as seen from Earth. Sketch the Sun and label the core, the surface and the corona.

Sort the telescopes on the page by the light they collect: radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-ray. Why must an X-ray telescope be in space? Match each wavelength to one thing it reveals.

Look up three satellites: one for weather, one for navigation, one for science. For each, say what it measures or sends and who uses it on the ground. Which one could science manage without? Explain your answer.

From the launches from Florida at the top of this page, note each rocket, its company and its cargo. List the kinds of work each launch creates in the state. Write a short summary: what would change in Florida if launches stopped?

Choose an asteroid on the list and look at its path. What keeps it going round the Sun instead of flying off in a straight line? What would happen to it if the Sun's gravity switched off?

Split the class into three teams, one per piece of evidence. Each team finds a telescope on the page that helps with its evidence and explains it in one minute. Which piece is the strongest, and why?

Read tonight's aurora outlook. What would have to happen on the Sun to raise it? Trace the chain from a coronal mass ejection to an aurora near the poles. Why are auroras so rarely seen from Florida?

Pick five satellites at different heights and note their periods. Show that the period squared divided by the orbit radius cubed is the same for all five. What does that constant tell you about Earth?

Compare a satellite 400 km up with one in geostationary orbit, 35,786 km up. Using distances from Earth's center (add 6,371 km), by what factor is the pull per kilogram weaker on the second one?

Read the station's speed and height. Which law explains why it does not slow down in space? Which force turns its straight-line motion into a circle? When it fires its engines to raise its orbit, what does the third law say about the exhaust?

Use the Florida launch list on this page as data: how many launches, which companies, what cargo. Research one effect (jobs, tourism, wildlife, the night sky) and present it. Then debate: should Florida build more launch pads?

Make a timeline from the first telescopes to the newest one on the page, noting the wavelengths each sees. Why did astronomers need to put telescopes above the atmosphere?

Get the next visible ISS pass for Miami or your own town. Note the compass direction (azimuth) where it appears and its highest altitude. A fist at arm's length covers about 10 degrees: show the class where to look.

Voyager 1's distance comes from the time its radio signal takes. Which method works for the nearest stars (parallax) and for other galaxies (standard candles)? Put all three on one scale chart.