Amazing Solar System Projects , livre ebook

Nomad Press - Delano Lopez , Shawn Braley

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88 pages

English

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Amazing Solar System Projects You Can Build Yourself introduces readers ages 9 and up to the basic elements of the solar system with over 25 hands-on building projects and activities. Readers learn about the sun, the planets and their moons, meteors and comets, and the amazing tools that astronomers and astronauts have used to study the solar system over the years.Amazing Solar System Projects You Can Build Yourself provides detailed step-by-step instructions and diagrams for creating the projects, which include making a greenhouse to see what happens on Venus and constructing a model of the phases of the moon to demonstrate why the moon has phases. Fascinating facts, anecdotes, biographies, and trivia are interspersed with the fun projects to teach readers all about the solar system.

Informations

Publié par	Nomad Press
Date de parution	01 janvier 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781619301177
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Nomad Press
A division of Nomad Communications
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2008 by Nomad Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. The trademark "Nomad Press" and the Nomad Press logo are trademarks of Nomad Communications, Inc. Printed in the United States.
ISBN: 9781934670002
Nebulae image on page 94 courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
All illustrations by Shawn Braley
Questions regarding the ordering of this book should be addressed to Independent Publishers Group
814 N. Franklin St.
Chicago, IL 60610
www.ipgbook.com
Nomad Press
2456 Christian St.
White River Junction, VT 05001
Contents
Timeline
Introduction
Famous Astronomers
Part 1: What is the Solar System?
How Big is Space?
Why is Venus Hotter Than Mercury?
Rings Around the Planets
Phases of the Moon
Orbiting Moon Model
Geocentrism & Heliocentrism
What Makes a Comet’s Tail?
Crater Maker
Asteroid Belt
Volcanism
Part 2: Astronomy & Exploration Tools… 43
Galileo’s Acceleration Ramp
Galilean Telescope
Rockets
Sputnik
Balloon Aerostat
The Eagle Has Landed
Magnetic Rail Launcher
Solar Wind Sails
Ion Drive
Seismometer
Solar Powered Spacecraft
Mars Exploration Rover
Part 3: Beyond the Solar System
Big Bang Balloon
What Is a Nebula?
Pulsar Model
Light-years and Parsecs
Templates
Glossary
Resources
Index
Timeline
About 13.7 Billion Years Ago The universe is created from the Big Bang.
About 4.6 Billion Years Ago The solar system forms.
150 BCE Ptolemy writes the Almagest describing the geocentric (earth-centered) model of the solar system.
1542CE Copernicus writes On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which describes the solar system as heliocentric, or sun centered.
1609 Johannes Kepler publishes New Astronomy based in part on the observations of Tycho Brahe. In this book, Kepler argues that the planets travel around the sun in elliptical orbits.
1610
Galileo Galilei is the first to use a telescope to observe the planets, discovers the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus.
1758 Halley’s Comet returns as predicted by Edmond Halley, proving that earlier observations of comets in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were, in fact, sightings of the same comet, which completes an orbit of the sun every 75 years or so.
1781 William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus.
1801 Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the first asteroid, Ceres, which is now considered a dwarf planet.
1838 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel measures the parallax of star 61 Cygni.
1846 The planet Neptune is discovered after both British and French teams of astronomers begin looking for a planet beyond Uranus.
1930 Clyde Tombaugh discovers the planet Pluto.
1957
The Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, marking the start of the Space Age.

1958 The United States launches its first satellite and forms NASA.
1962 The Mariner 2 becomes the first unmanned craft to successfully visit another planet when it passes near Venus.
1966 The Venera 3 becomes the first unmanned craft to land on another planet, Venus.
1969
Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon.
1971 The Mars 3 Lander is the first unmanned craft to land on Mars.
1974 The Mariner 10 spacecraft performs the first flyby observations of Mercury.
1977 The Voyager 1 spacecraft is launched to study the outer planets, passing Jupiter in 1979, and Saturn in 1980.
1986 The Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, flies close to Uranus and discovers 10 of its moons.
1989 Voyager 2 flies close to Neptune and Triton, one of its moons.
2005 The discover of the dwarf planet Eris is announced by the team of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz.
2006 Pluto is reclassifed as a dwarf planet.
Introduction

H ave you ever stared up at the stars at night and wondered how they got there? Have you looked at the moon and wished you could land on it and explore its surface? Do you dream of being an astronaut and walking on the face of another planet? Do you think of being an astronomer, and examining the planets with telescopes? Maybe you could drive a robotic rover over the landscape of a foreign world, by remote control.
You know that the solar system is made up of planets, moons, and other objects, but do you know how we learned about them? We know about the solar system because scientists, astronomers, and astronauts have spent many, many years studying the sky, and developing more and more advanced tools to study it, including telescopes, rockets, probes, and rovers. Their efforts have gained much information about our neighboring planets in the solar system, as well as taught us about our own planet and the life and environment on it.
This book will help you learn about the planets and other objects that make up the solar system, and some astronomical objects beyond it. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, What is the Solar System, describes the solar system and what we know about its components. The second section, Astronomy & Exploration Tools, covers the history of human study of space and the solar system, and the tools we used to do it. The third section, Beyond the Solar System, investigates the history of the universe, and things in space that are beyond our solar system.
Most of the projects in this book can be made by kids with minimal adult supervision, and the supplies needed are either common household items or easily available at craft stores. So take a step toward the planets and get ready to Build it Yourself.
Spotlight on Famous Astronomers
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a Danish nobleman, and one of the most interesting characters in the history of astronomy. He discovered a supernova in 1572. His careful observations of the motions of the planets allowed his assistant, Johannes Kepler, to devise his rules of planetary motion.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848) was a German astronomer living in England. She worked closely with her brother William Herschel and helped him with his discovery of the planet Uranus. She also discovered three nebulae and eight comets on her own. She was the first woman to discover a comet.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921) began her career at the Harvard College Observatory and worked her way up to director of stellar photometry, which measures the intensity of a star’s radiation. Leavitt discovered Cepheid variables. These are stars that brighten and dim in a steady pattern related to their size. She developed a formula that described this relationship. This allowed her, and astronomers who came after her, to calculate the distance of these stars.
S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland. She was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 while she was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. She discovered it with her teacher, Antony Hewish. Hewish later received the Nobel Prize for this discovery, though many people think that Burnell should have shared the prize.
Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) spent his entire career at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where he made some fascinating discoveries. He used the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson to detect Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula. This proved that Andromeda was not just a cloud of gas, but was its own galaxy, a collection of billions of stars two million light years from ours. He also discovered that the other galaxies in the universe are all moving away from each other, and that the universe itself is expanding. This gave support to the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe. He helped us understand that we live in a huge universe full of billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. The Hubble Space Telescope was named in his honor.
Percival Lowell (1855–1916) was an American businessman and world traveler from a wealthy family in Boston. He built the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to pursue his interest in Mars. Lowell also believed that there was a planet beyond Neptune, and spent the last years of his life looking for it. Fourteen years after his death, a young man name Clyde Tombaugh discovered this planet, Pluto, while working at the Lowell Observatory.
Clyde Tombaugh (1906–1997) built his own telescope and made drawings of Jupiter and Mars based on his observations. He sent these drawings to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. His drawings were so good that, even though he had no formal training in astronomy at this point, he was offered a job at the observatory. While there, he was assigned to look for a mysterious planet "X" that was believed to lie beyond Neptune. Percival Lowell believed such a planet was responsible for disturbances in Neptune’s orbit. Tombaugh discovered this by looking carefully at pictures of the sky from one night to the next, looking for any points of light that moved as much as such a planet should. He found one in 1930, which turned out to be Pluto. He went on to study astronomy formally, even though he had already discovered a planet. Tombaugh discovered 14 asteroids, some of which he named after his wife and children.
What is the Solar System?

E VERY PERSON YOU KNOW AND EVERY PLACE YOU HAVE EVER been is located within a very small segment of the universe called the solar system. The solar system is actually quite big compared to you, your backyard, or even the whole earth itself, but it is tiny compared to the size of our galaxy, and minuscule compared to the entire universe.
So what is the solar system? What is it that separates the solar system from the rest of the universe? What makes it a system of connected parts? Most simply, it is defined by the sun and its gravity. The solar system is named after Sol, our sun. The rest o