If you own a laptop, you may bring it to class.
Pre-Lab Assignment: In lab today, you will draw a slip of paper with your assignment. You will be writing your report on that particular object.
1) Look up the semi-major axes for Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars in AU. There is a chart of these values in the back of your textbook. Write down these values.
2) Your assigned site is located on Mercury, Venus, the Moon, or Mars. In the back of the book, look up the diameter for each of those objects in kilometers. (Since the Moon isn't a planet, its information will not be listed with the planets.)
3) What kinds of activities would you like to be available at a tourist site?
Introduction: In this lab, you get to use your more creative side. We shall pretend that it is the year 2300 CE, and life is rather different from what it was in the early 21st century. By 2300 CE, most of the solid bodies of the Solar System have been colonized: all of the Terrestrial planets, the Moon, and several of the larger moons of the Jovian planets. Advances in spaceflight have reduced the travel time between any of the bodies of the inner solar system to a matter of hours. Commercial interplanetary flights are now common and are as inexpensive as airplane tickets were in the early 21st century.
You have just been hired to work at a small travel agency on Earth. Your first assignment is to write a travel brochure for one of the major tourist sites of the inner Solar System. It is your job to make the site sound exciting so that it will draw more tourists.
Unfortunately, this is your first day on the job. You have some resources at your disposal in which you can look up some of the more basic details that you will need for your tourist site. However, you have never been to the site and nobody at the office can give you any first-hand details about what activities are available at the site. As such, you decide to use some artistic license (educated artistic license, of course). That is to say that you can make some educated guesses as to the type of entertainment that will be available at your particular site. If you want a quick promotion, you had better be creative, yet accurate enough not to bring complaints from customers who went to your travel destination and found none of the things described in the brochure.
Procedure: You have the basic details of the assignment. Now, let's look at some of the specifics you will need. You drew a piece of paper telling you the tourist site you should research for your brochure. If you didn't get an assignment in class, see the lab instructor.
Each travel brochure must include travel directions. After all, sites aren't very interesting if you can't get to them. You must include directions from all of the Terrestrial planets, meaning that you must tell them how long the trip will take them. Assume that 0.2 AU of distance = 1 hour of travel time. You need to remember that distances between planets change, so you must mention the longest and shortest travel times. We will simplify this by assuming that the planets are on circular orbits. Using the values for the semi-major axes you looked up in the pre-lab, find the shortest distance and the longest distance you would have to travel. As an example, let's consider travel between Jupiter and Earth. From the appendix of your textbook, Jupiter's semi-major axis is approximately 5.2 AU and Earth's semi-major axis is 1 AU.
The figure on the left shows Jupiter and two positions of Earth as it orbits the Sun. It can be seen from the figure that the minimum distance between Jupiter and Earth is 5.2 AU – 1 AU = 4.2 AU and the maximum distance between Jupiter and Earth is 5.2 AU + 1 AU = 6.2 AU. Since 0.2 AU of distance is equivalent to 1 hour of travel time, we see that 4.2 AU would be equivalent to 21 hours of travel time and 6.2 AU would be equivalent to 31 hours of travel time. Follow this procedure to determine the travel times to your world. (The change in distance between planets means that you can expect that your site will experience tourist seasons, i.e. times of the year when you get more tourists and that you will tend to get tourists from different planets at different times of the year.)
Obviously, the distance from Earth to Earth is zero. If your site is located on Mercury, Venus, or Mars, place an X in each blank under the name of the object on which your site is located. However, if your site is on the Moon, use the following instructions.
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Special Instructions for tourist sites on the Moon 1. Assume that the distance from one of the Terrestrial planets to the Moon is the same as the distance from that planet to Earth. 2. Place an X in the first two blanks in the Earth column. 3. Assume that the trip from Earth to the Moon takes 18 minutes = 0.3 hours. Fill in 0.3 hours for each of the time blanks in the Earth column. |
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| shortest distance from your world to | ||||
| longest distance from your world to | ||||
| shortest time from your world to | |
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| longest time from your world to |
Include the chart you've just finished in the brochure. It should go at the end in the travel directions section.
Now that you are able to get them to the right world, we need to figure out how far it is from the spaceport to our tourist site. However, we need to establish the scale of the globe first. You will find globes of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon in the lab room. To determine the circumference of the equator of the globe, take a long length of string and place it on the globe of your site. After you determine how much string covers the equator, measure the string (in centimeters) using one of the meter sticks. Record this length in the space below.
1. Length of string (in cm) around the equator of the globe: _____________________
Now, we need to calculate the circumference of the world. You looked up the diameter of the world in your pre-lab (question 2). Find the circumference by using the following formula and record your answer in the space below.
2. Circumference of the world (in km): _________________________
Now, find the scale of the globe by dividing the circumference by the length of the string. This gives you the scale in km/cm. Record this value in the space below.
3. Scale of the globe (in km/cm): ________________________
Of course, there aren't an infinite number of spaceports on each body. Assume that there are only two spaceports located at the equator of the planet, but on opposite sides. Each globe has longitude and latitude markings on it, just like an Earth globe would. The spaceports are located at a latitude of 0° and longitudes of 0° and 180°.
Find your object on the globe. Not all of the objects are pictured on the globe. If the object is not marked on the globe, the latitude and longitude coordinates of the object (or other means by which you can locate the site) will be written on the piece of paper your drew in class.
Note: The longitude markings on the Moon globe are different from the other globes. The planets' globes mark longitude from 0° to 360°. The Moon globe marks longitude as we see on Earth, 0° to 180° East and West.
Now, take the string and find the shortest distance from the closest spaceport to your tourist site (measure to the center of the site). Use the meter stick to measure the length of this piece of string.
4. Length of string from spaceport to center of site (in cm): ________________________
Now, multiply the length of the string by the scale to get the distance from the spaceport to the site in km. Record this answer in the space provided.
5. Distance from spaceport to site (in km): __________________________
Now, let's assume that the transport vehicles available at the airport can travel at 2,000 km/hr. Use this fact to calculate the travel time from the spaceport to the site. Record your answer in the space below, expressing your answer to the nearest 0.1 hour.
6. Travel time from spaceport to site (to nearest 0.1 hour): _____________________
Put the "travel time from spaceport to site" information in in the travel directions section at the end of the brochure.
You have now completed the portion of the assignment that must be done in the lab. The rest of the lab will require some textbook and/or internet research.
Research: Now you are ready to start talking about your particular site. Use your textbook, textbooks available in the lab room, and whatever resources you can find on the web to look up information about your site. You will want to find out what the site is, how large it is, and why the site is special, e.g. it is the largest or the only one of its kind. If you are stuck, there are some links here.
Now you are ready for the most creative part. If you were running this tourist site, what kinds of entertainment and activities would you plan for people visiting your site. By the year 2300, you can imagine that almost anything you can think of for a particular site will at least have been tried once, so it is likely that whatever you mention will be available to the tourists (with obvious exception, like skiing or hiking inside of an active volcano).
For example, you can expect cold places to have winter sports and activities available (e.g. skiing and ice skating) and mountains or large craters may have rock climbing, hiking trails, and cable cars. You might also want to look up a value for the surface gravity on the planet. A low-gravity environment might open up more entertainment possibilities. Be creative.
Of course, tourist places don't want any of their customers to die, so appropriate accommodations will be provided (space suits and oxygen). Just so, it would be good to remind the tourists (especially those who never took an astronomy class) what conditions they can expect to find (e.g. no atmosphere, extreme heat or cold, etc.).
And as a last piece of advice, don't forget to remind them about the many gift shops: open long hours and just waiting to sell them the souvenir of their dreams.
Requirements: Your brochure should be at least one page in length, consisting of at least two paragraphs about the site, a paragraph or two about its available attractions, and a short section at the end with the travel directions. You should also print out a picture of the site for the front cover. Have fun!
As with all research projects, you must cite the works you've consulted. Include citations for the pictures you use in the brochure as well. These citations do not need to be printed in the brochure; you can turn them in as a separate attachment with the work you completed here.
You don't have to go overboard on this assignment. The assignment is only designed to take about two hours to complete. However, if you wish to do additional work, it may be worthy of extra credit. Check with your instructor.
Possible forms of submission:
You have been instructed to put your work into a brochure, but the
use of paper may be completely outdated by the year 2300. Here are
a few other options to consider:
1) You could use an electronic document for the assignment. Microsoft
Word allows you to insert pictures and text.
2) You could set up a presentation using a program like PowerPoint.
Some flashy animations could really drive the customers to your door.
3) You could set up a simple website for the assignment. This would
enable you to include links to other information to entice the
customer.
4) It would also be okay to make up an advertisement and send it via
email. You can attach pictures to an email.
Here's a checklist of items required for full credit on this lab. You can include everything (besides the pre-lab) in your brochure, or you can turn in the travel times table and travel time from spaceport separately. Include the following items: