Your Space Homework

Hello 7Ch, here is your homework, due in on Thursday 25th October, in the last week before half term:

Your mission is to produce a timeline for the human exploration of space.

The timeline starts on 4th October 1957 (why? you'll find out) and you need to list the significant events up to the present day. Once your timeline is complete identify what you think are the five most significant events and describe them in detail.

This web page is a good starting place. Remember that cutting and pasting from the internet is cheating. It is officially called plagiarism. Your task is to sift through all the information and turn it into your own work.

Decide how you will present your work. It could be a large poster, a powerpoint or word document or maybe a video like a TV documentary.

Have fun, and good luck!

Space Movies

Someone was asking which were the other good movies about space and the universe. Well, there are a whole bunch of great Sci-Fi films out there: Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Armageddon, The Fifth Element and so on.
But very few deal with us earthlings and what it might be like to leave our planet. And very few get the science right. So here are my top three:

Space is Big

Space is big.
You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts compared to space.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

He was right, too. The picture above was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and zooms in on a tiny tiny patch of sky that astronomers used to think was really uninteresting. What it shows us is just how much stuff is really out there. it looks like a lot of stars, but only one of the blobs of light is actually a star (the bluish one in the middle). All of the rest of the objects in the picture are galaxies, giant island universes made from billions of stars, all with their own planetary sytems, nebulae, black holes and so on. And in just this one picture of the smallest part of the night sky imaginable, we can count hundreds or even thousands of them.
Does anybody live out there? We may never know, but as Jodie Foster says in the film Contact,

The universe is a pretty big place. So if it's just us . . . it seems like an awful waste of space.