Home School Lesson Plan: Comets: 3+ hours of video.

Today, Aug 6th, 2014, the Rosetta Mission reached comet #67P. I learned about this from a Facebook Post by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Comet countdown! Just a few hours until ESA's Rosetta Mission arrives at‪#‎67P‬. Live coverage starts 1 a.m. PT (4 a.m. ET, 0800 UTC)http://rosetta.esa.int/" ~~ JPL

Being a little late to the party, I wanted to promote a possible home school lesson plan involving the event. I will begin by visiting the site for The Rosetta Mission from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Facebook post.

Source: Rosetta Mission page

Along the left side of the image you see above, there are a sequence of circles on the Rosetta Mission page. The first circle displays the image above, which is a beautiful and clear images of the comet called #67P. The next circle will take you to a video stream of the media event as Rosetta reached its destination. This is an hour and a 40 minutes of Core Science credit.

However, I think it would be a nicer introduction to the children to begin with the cartoon videos lower in the list. The third button from the top introduces the mission in a cartoon format running 4 minutes. It should be easily digested by even very young children. This provides background and a frame of reference for why we should be interested in the mission.

The fourth button will provide another two and a half minutes. This describes the mounting excitement as Rosetta wakes from her long slumber and prepared for her work. The process of aiming the satellite and adjusting speed and trajectory to match the comet must have required a lot of planing and precision from the European Space Agency. Watching this video helps build a sense of anticipation and importance.

 For a little more detail, the following YouTube video can illustrate some of the degree of planning that goes into such missions. (2 minutes, no words.)

The Rosetta website also provides a link to a visualization of the flight of the Rosetta Mission. It is tucked away under a heading that asks, "Where is Rosetta?" which doesn't reveal the detail found by visiting the link. That is to say, it draws out the flight path of the mission which can further demonstrate the planning and, one hopes, inspire a student with the notion that some great things require a great amount of planning and patience to accomplish. (The child can look for astronomical navigation tricks like what appears to be a gravitational slingshot occurring in the early part of 2005. It might be interesting to ask they child if they can guess what is happening and why.)

The full progress of the visualization takes some time to complete. I don't have a timer to consult, but it appears as if the visualization runs at 1 day per second. The date range from 3/3/2004 to 8/4/2014. This web page allows calculation of a date range. If we trust the results, we come up with 3,806 days. Dividing by 60 results in about 63 minutes to watch the entire path. We should probably assume even the most ardent student will not possess that much patience. I'd time them and give them credit for the time they chose to spend on it, however.

If one wants to hurry past this part (reasonable, I think) you should still check out the Milestones. One of those milestones is Rosetta going into the long sleep mentioned in the video found at the fourth circle on the Rosetta home page referenced above. The following milestone occurs when "Sleeping Beauty" awakes.

The fifth circle continues to build expectation. One could skip this two minutes of "Are we there yet?" if one felt so inclined. I think there is some value in building expectation. For an enjoyable break, you might follow the link labeled "Competition Voting Open." Here you will see the photographs people who were eagerly anticipating Rosetta's arrival submitted for the "Rosetta, are we there yet?" campaign. Some should make you smile. You might also pique the student's interest in a small, related, art project.

Returning to the second circle down from the top, we have now should have sufficient interest raised. With all of the videos added together, we are getting pretty close to a full two hours of video time, all Core Science credit. I will admit that it seems as if the servers may be having some trouble today as I am writing this lesson plan. This might have to do with streaming video over from Europe or it might be an example of demand for the video exceeding the ESA's web server capacity. An alternate link to watch the video (it appears to be the same video) can be found at a LiveStream url. (If you skip ahead to 12:15 seconds in the LiveStream video you can skip a boring waiting period.)

You might be thinking that this is a lot of material to cover. However, from the "Mission" page there is so much more yet to explore.

• Rosetta at comet: First images & science results (1 hr 16 minutes)
• Postcards from Rosetta (Some pictures)
• Hello Comet (an Article)
• The Rosetta Blog

(If this all seems nice, but a little advanced for your young star-gazer, you might consider allowing them to explore the ESA's general kids website.)

Additional Viewing:

Investigating Comets I Rosetta Mission I Exploratorium (26 minutes)

An entire YouTube Video list related to the Rosetta Mission.