Materials Clay • Brushes • Paint • Learning Objectives Learn about the characteristics and location of asteroids, and how planets and asteroids form. Background Science Asteroids are boulders orbiting the Sun, with sizes ranging between some hundred metres and several kilometres. Credit: NASA / JAXA / Arecibo / NSF / ESA An asteroid is called a meteorite if it hits the Earth. If it completely evaporates in the Earth’s atmosphere before crashing on the surface, it’s called a meteor. People usually refer to meteors as stars’. Most meteorites are predominantly composed of silicates or a mixture of iron and ‘shooting nickel. In the past, some huge meteorites have struck the Earth. Sixty-five million years ago, almost 90% of animal species were eradicated (among them the dinosaurs) when a meteorite hit Yucatan, Mexico. Luckily, this happens very rarely! We owe this to Jupiter, which attracts many asteroids with its gravitational pull. Many asteroids form rings or belts around the Sun. There are two asteroid belts in our Solar System: the main belt (or simply called asteroid belt) between Mars and Jupiter, with thousands of asteroids (see picture below), and the Kuiper belt, named after its discoverer, a disk-shaped region that extends outside of Neptune’s orbit and contains countless asteroids and many dwarf planets, of which Pluto is the most famous. Credit: UNAWE / C.Provot Full description Ask the children to take a piece of clay the size of their fist. Let them divide it into small pieces and place these fragments on a table. Now ask them to squeeze all the pieces together to form one large asteroid, without kneading it. Let them hit the clay chunk with the knuckle of a finger a few times. After washing their hands, they can paint the asteroid.
Materials • Clay • Brushes • Paint Learning Objectives Learn about the characteristics and location of asteroids, and how planets and asteroids form. Background Science Asteroids are boulders orbiting the Sun, with sizes ranging between some hundred metres and several kilometres. Credit: NASA / JAXA / Arecibo / NSF / ESA An asteroid is called a meteorite if it hits the Earth. If it completely evaporates in the Earth’s atmosphere before crashing on the surface, it’s called a meteor. People usually refer to meteors as ‘shooting stars’. Most meteorites are predominantly composed of silicates or a mixture of iron and nickel. In the past, some huge meteorites have struck the Earth. Sixty-five million years ago, almost 90% of animal species were eradicated (among them the dinosaurs) when a meteorite hit Yucatan, Mexico. Luckily, this happens very rarely! We owe this to Jupiter, which attracts many asteroids with its gravitational pull. Many asteroids form rings or belts around the Sun. There are two asteroid belts in our Solar System: the main belt (or simply called asteroid belt) between Mars and Jupiter, with thousands of asteroids (see picture below), and the Kuiper belt, named after its discoverer, a disk-shaped region that extends outside of Neptune’s orbit and contains countless asteroids and many dwarf planets, of which Pluto is the most famous. Credit: UNAWE / C.Provot Full description Ask the children to take a piece of clay the size of their fist. Let them divide it into small pieces and place these fragments on a table. Now ask them to squeeze all the pieces together to form one large asteroid, without kneading it. Let them hit the clay chunk with the knuckle of a finger a few times. After washing their hands, they can paint the asteroid.
Universe_in_Box_activitybook.docx