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Solar System Explorers Presenter Notes

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Laura Daniela Jimenez Prada
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12 views5 pages

Solar System Explorers Presenter Notes

Uploaded by

Laura Daniela Jimenez Prada
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Vital Stats:

Audience School Holiday Visitors, ages 5-12

Style In-person, presentation into design workshop

Duration 60-90 minutes

Participants Up to 30

Presenter Tools NASA’s Eyes: Solar System Interactive


https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/
Participant Crafting materials
Resources Planet fact files
Goals Fun/entertainment
Consider what humans and human-like life needs to be able to survive
Understand other planets are different from Earth and different from
each other, and what causes those differences
Understand technology can be (and is) used to allow exploration
Encounter NASA’s Eyes as a tool for learning more about the solar
system

(Operation: Solar System Explorers is an in-person rebrand of the updated Operation:


Goldilocks virtual programme.)

Basic Structure
Presentation • Discuss what humans and human-like life needs to survive 20 min
• Examine the solar system, discussing what features are
hostile to life, and how they have come about
• Introduce the task: design a vehicle that will let you
explore another world
Research and • Brainstorm and identify (at least) three things that will ~10 min
Planning make it difficult to visit the world of your choice
• Consider potential solutions

Building • Construct a model of your vehicle showing how you 30 min +


address the problems you have identified
Presentation
• No slides
• Load https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/ before presentation, start with screen black/
projector off

Block 1: Preamble
• Acknowledge country, welcome to the Centre, and introduce the Agency as normal

Block 2: Life and Space


• Ask who would/wouldn’t like to visit somewhere away from Earth.
 Ask the wouldn’ts why that is.
 Ask the woulds what they might need to take into consideration.
• Starting from some of the answers, observe that life (as we know it) has certain
needs, and maybe other places in our solar system don’t meet some or all of those
needs.
• Ask for suggestions of things humans specifically or human-like life in general needs
(see: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, supplied later in this document, for background
reading and inspiration.)
 Mentally keep track of suggestions. It can be a good idea to have a list of about
4-5 responses you want to “tick off” using audience suggestions, and start using
more prompted questioning if you aren’t getting those last few suggestions…!

Block 3: What’s It Like Out There?


• Project https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/ on the screen.
• Start working through the list of needs:
1. Temperature: We can’t be too hot or too cold.
 Can anyone indicate somewhere we’d find it too hot?
 Why would that place be too hot?
 What about too cold, and why?
2. Air and Atmosphere: We need air to breathe, and the atmosphere (the air and
other gases wrapped around the planet) acts like a blanket to keep a planet
warm, holding in the heat that arrives from the sun.
 Where might we find there’s not enough air?
 Where might there be an atmosphere we can’t breathe?
 What planets might have an atmosphere that would cause us other
problems? (Venus)
3. What about… After you’ve established that heat and light come from the sun,
being further from the sun means the sunlight is weaker, and the chemical
composition and thickness of the atmosphere affects temperature and
survivability, pick a few (2-3) planets with features that haven’t been addressed
yet for very brief discussion.
 Jupiter/Saturn?
Audience might consider:
 Surface?
 Gravity? (Note Saturn is similar to Earth because of low density)
 Storms?
 Neptune/Uranus?
Audience might consider:
 Energy? (dim sunlight = difficult for solar power)
 Surface?
 Weather?
 Mercury/Mars?
Audience might consider:
 Dust and craters?
 Weaker gravity?
 Very large day-night temperature variations?
 Stronger cosmic radiation?

Block 4: Your Task, If You Choose To Accept It…


• Introduce and commence design task, planning phase:
We are nicely adapted to live on Earth, and as you’ve pointed out to me, it’s difficult to
survive in other places. But, humans, we like to explore, to discover, to find new things.
In a moment, I’ll ask you to choose a planet you’d like to explore, and think about three
things that will make it difficult to visit there. While you’re thinking of those things, you
might also want to think about whether you’d like to visit it yourself, or if you want to get a
robot — a rover — to do it for you.
Once you’ve thought of three things that will make it difficult to visit that other planet, I
invite you to think about what you would include on a planet exploring vehicle to get around
those three difficult things.

Block 5: If You Build It…


• Over the PA, introduce next task: building
 Use the craft materials provided to make a model of your space exploring
vehicle, including special features to help you (or your robot) survive on the
planet you’ve chosen.
The Design Process:
As there’s no scope for testing, this will not be using the SCRAP Challenge design cycle
model. The cycle in use is depicted below.

Planning:
Participants choose a destination, collect the corresponding printed “fact file”, and identify
the problems they need to consider.
Below is an example of one of the “fact files”.

Building:
Based on their plan, participants gather crafting materials, and build a model/prototype
exploration vehicle. To facilitate, ask about features on participants’ models related to what
they know about their destination planet.
Trivia and Background:
Why isn’t Pluto a planet?
There are three rules for being a planet:
 You orbit the sun, or another star
 You’re big (massive) enough that your gravity pulls you into a ball shape
 You’re big (massive) enough that you’ve cleared away any other objects of a
similar size to yourself from the area of your orbit.
Pluto is a planet…. Kind of. It is a dwarf planet. It doesn’t meet condition 3: hanging out
in the Kuiper belt, it has a lot of neighbours almost as bit as itself. Ceres, in the asteroid
belt, is also a dwarf planet, for the same reason.

What about Goldilocks?


The messaging for Solar System Explorers and the new virtual Goldilocks has been
refocused.
The key messages should now be:
• Humans and human-like life require certain conditions to survive
• The location relative to the sun, composition, and structure of planets determine
the surface conditions of those planets
The idea of the habitable zone emerges from these concepts, and does not need to be
addressed in-depth (or at all).

Human Needs: Maslow’s Hierarchy


This is one model for identifying and understanding human needs. While our tendency is
to focus on physiological needs, participants will sometimes want to address higher-
order needs as well.

Image from Desmet, P.; Fokkinga, S. Beyond Maslow’s Pyramid: Introducing a Typology of Thirteen
Fundamental Needs for Human-Centered Design. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2020, 4, 38

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