For 50 years the folks who travel into space have cooperated above the borders that divide those on land. But as we find space not so empty will lines be drawn? Astronaut Donald K. Slayton and cosmonaut Aleksey A. Leonov are seen together in the Soyuz Orbital Module...
The sun might be 93 million miles away, but its flares cause blackouts and GPS to break down here on earth. Get ready. We are approaching the solar maximum. Passengers on the MS Trollfjord watch as an aurora covers the sky along the Norwegian coast on 19 October 2019....
Many of the more than five thousand satellites orbiting the earth are capable of producing high-resolution images. International agreements aren’t as clear. A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looks down at a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovers over the...
Light pollution interferes with the breeding patterns of animals and insects. How can we look to the stars if we can’t even see them? Two night scenes. On the left, stars fill the sky over the Coconino National Forest. (Credit: Coconino National Forest, U.S....
Light pollution affects more than just our ability to see the Big Dipper at night. Dive into the environmental and human consequences of too much light and discover how we might turn the night sky on again.
Exercise: After reading the article, divide students into groups of 3-4 to discuss main takeaways from the text. Then, instruct each group to come up with a one-sentence public service announcement to get people to turn off unnecessary lights in their local community. The class can then vote for their favorite PSA.
Oh Tang! If our seas rise too high there are exoplanets to settle. But hope you like freeze-dried food, because it’s a long trip out there. This illustration shows a fictional astronaut on Mars, as viewed through the window of a spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)...
Fearing the prospect that our seas will rise and our climate will get too hot to make life comfortable on Earth, some smart people are thinking about new homes in outer space. But is there a so-called Planet B we could actually reach in a spaceship and what would life be like there? In an entertaining article that takes us through time and space, correspondent Tira Shubart explores these possibilities and comes to the conclusion that maybe we should concentrate our money and energy on cleaning up our own backyard.
Exercise: Shubart tells us that it is unlikely that Mars could be made habitable for humans. But let’s say that your students could come up with the technology that would make that possible. What would they need to produce to make Mars a place where people could live? Have them brainstorm a list of devices that would solve the problems Shubart discusses in the article. Then ask them to come up with a list of ways we could clean up our environment on earth.