Solar Power for Exploration Challenge

From NASA, Solar Energy for Space Exploration is a problem-based learning activity. The project requires students to propose and defend a design to provide power to a lunar or Martian research base for six astronauts. To prepare for the final project, students investigate the variables that affect the operation of...

From Earth to Mars

This Catalyst article describes how a crewed trip to Mars and back would be very demanding, both technologically and for the people involved.

This article is from Catalyst: Secondary Science Review 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2.

Catalyst is a...

Space-based Astronomy Educator Guide

These resources from NASA look at why telescopes are put into space. Students build simple spectroscopes and telescopes to learn the answer to this question. This educator guide is divided into units of study that include science demonstrations, lesson plans and student sheets so that students may learn about Earth...

Stars, Nebulae, Galaxies

NASA has been responsible for some fantastic images of space, especially from the Hubble Space Telescope. These are a few of the images of stars, nebulae and galaxies. More images are available from the  NASA website

The ESA/ESO Astronomy Exercise Series

The object of this resource, produced by ESA and ESO, is to present various small projects that will pass on some of the excitement and satisfaction in scientific discovery, to students. Using elementary geometrical and physical considerations, students will be able to derive answers that are comparable with the...

Saturn V Rocket Lift-off, Showing Staging

This clip, from Footagevault, could be used for teaching Key Stage Three and Four content on energy, electricity and forces, or chemical and material behaviour. The film clip dramatically shows Newton's Third Law of Motion in action, "to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction...". The footage...

Apollo 1 Fire - the Aftermath

This historic footage, from Footagevault, was recorded at the top of the Apollo 1 rocket stack shortly after the fire which claimed the lives of the first Apollo astronauts. The film shows how ferociously things burn in a high pressure pure oxygen environment. The engineers running this Apollo test procedure had...

Big Telescopes

The Big Telescopes poster links ground and space based telescopes with the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that they are observing and their locations on Earth or in space.

The poster explains how larger telescopes allow scientists to learn more about the early universe and map our own galaxy with...

Astronauts Leaping on the Moon

This footage, from Footagevault, documents the locomotion of humans on the moon under reduced gravity conditions. It can be used with Key Stage Three and Four students to start discussions about forces. This clip shows Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan leaping towards the camera with great big kangaroo hops.