Astronautics Activity Badge

1. Show how craters are formed. Use marbles, rubber balls or stones as meteorites and a tray filled with sand as your planet/moon surface.

2. Try the same experiment again but this time, make changes to the speed, density and size of the meteorite. How does it affect the crater formed? Test the different effects fairly by keeping one element of your experiment the same, like the amount of sand in the tray.

3. Compare satellite images of Mars and the moon with satellite images of Earth. Point out similar landscape features such as craters, valleys and volcanoes.

4. Build your own satellite dish. Cover a torch in paper slits and a range of mirrors, flat and concave, to show how concave satellite dishes focus signals from satellites.

5. In a group, debate about life elsewhere in the universe. What might it look like? How do we search for life on other planets and moons? How would the human race react to the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?

6. Explain what each of these are and how they’re used: space probe, satellite, space station, space observatory or a telescope, space shuttle, rocket, rover and payload.

7. Build a paper model of a spacecraft. Make marks on the model to identify the instruments on board that enable it to complete its mission.

8. Build, launch and recover a model rocket. Make a second launch to achieve a specific objective, such as carrying a fragile payload, aerial photography, altitude measurement, temperature measurement, parachute recovery, remote control, building a launch controller or a launch pad.