Middle School Inquiry Lab on Manned Space Exploration
In this lab students will evaluate different types of spacesuits used on manned space missions. Students will be challenged to think about what accommodations would be necessary for each type of mission.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How do engineers determine what features and materials are needed for a space suit?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- space suit printout
- heat area
- 2 thermometers
- clear tape
- 2 zippered sandwich bags
- 1 sheet of black construction paper
- 1 sheet bright white paper
- choice of one other insulating material
- container of room-temperature water
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students start off by researching how the spacesuit has evolved based on the missions NASA needed to complete in order to take us to the Moon. From Mercury to the current suit required to take us to and from the International Space Station, students will use this information to help design a suit needed for our next mission, Mars.
Students test the thermal insulating properties of different materials to understand why certain materials make better space suits than others. For the first portion of testing, students tape a spacesuit cut out on the front of a plastic bag, while they tape a black and white sheet on the back of these bags. Students tape a thermometer in each bag and will take reading as to the interior temperature of each bag every minute during a 10-minute time period.
For the second portion of the insulation test, students will then add their choice of insulating material equally in each bag. Once filled, students will place thermometers once again and will take readings every minute for another 10-minute time period. Students will then take the data from both tests and create a line graph and compare the results.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- What do astronauts need protection from when traveling in space?
- Compare your Mars space suit features to another group. How are they different? How would the differences affect an astronaut in the suit?
- How did adding insulation affect the thermal properties of the “suit” in your experiment?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 7.9B – Identify the accommodations, considering the characteristics of our solar system, that enabled manned space exploration.
