comets

Back Down 2 Earth (BD2E) is an expansion of the existing Down 2 Earth (D2E) education project which teaches school students aged 11-19 about the geological side to astronomy. In this 46-page booklet you will learn about the wonders of comets and asteroids and the possible destruction that these bodies can cause on planets such as our own.

View this as a web-page (some material omitted).

In this activity students will work out how long it takes light to travel from comet Tempel 1 to Earth and how long after the collision in the Deep Impact mission we will see this event.

Objectives

Students will:

The aim of this activity is to use vectors and Pythagoras’ theorem to work out the speed at which an impactor hits a comet.

A simple literacy task for KS2 or KS3 students to help familiarise them with terms relating to comets.

A simple literacy task for KS2 or KS3 students, to help them become familiar with terms related to comets.

The aim of this activity is to calculate the kinetic energy of an impact and to learn how the kinetic energy changes when the weight of an impactor is altered.