Solar Sails: The Future of Space Travel
Teams of students in grades 7 to 9 follow the engineering design process to create, construct, test, and improve model solar sails made of aluminum foil to move cardboard tube satellites through “space” on a string. During the process, they learn about Newton’s laws of motion and the transfer of energy from wave energy to mechanical energy.
Filed under: Class Activities, Grades 6-8, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plans | Comments Off on Solar Sails: The Future of Space Travel
Tags: Aerospace, Class Activities, Design, energy transfer, Engineering Design Process, forces and motion, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Lesson Plan, Newton, Newton's Laws, NGSS aligned activity, solar sails, space exploration, spacecraft, teachengineering
Talk about “high impact” engineering! On September 26, NASA intentionally crashed a small spacecraft into an asteroid, providing the world’s first full-scale demonstration of planetary defense missions to deflect potential near-Earth hazards. 
A prototype asteroid explorer developed by University of Central Florida engineers and Honeybee Robotics mines water from the asteroid’s soil for propulsion. 
A White House directive has NASA recalculating the route toward human exploration of the solar system, starting with returning humans to the Moon.
Students in grades 6 to 8 use water balloons and string to understand how the force of gravity between two objects and the velocity of a spacecraft can balance to form an orbit. They see that when the velocity becomes too great for gravity to hold the spacecraft in orbit, the object escapes the orbit and travels further away from the planet.
