Rendezvous
with a
Comet
The Problem
Design a Space Alien
The Problem
The time is far in the future....
Astronauts have traveled to the moons and planets of the solar system....
They are now ready to begin flights to nearby stars…
You are a member of a special team whose task it is to determine what sort of space aliens might be found on far away worlds…
While no life has been discovered within the solar system outside of planet Earth, that might not be the case with other worlds orbiting distant stars....
To get an idea of what other advanced life forms might be like should the astronauts find them (or if they should come to visit us on Earth first!), your team has been asked to study the moons and planets of our solar system. You will determine what sort of life forms could be living on these worlds.
What are the conditions on other worlds, and what might life forms look like that have naturally adapted to these conditions? Are these places hot or cold, light or dark, wet or dry, oxygen rich or oxygen poor, high pressure or low pressure, high gravity or low gravity, thick or thin atmosphere, lightning or no lightning, winds or no winds, water or no water, etc.?
You and your research team have been invited to design a space alien that is best adapted to life on one of the solar system's planets or moons with atmospheres. Those bodies are Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as well as Saturn's moon Titan. Mercury is too hot to have an atmosphere, and Pluto is too cold. In addition, Pluto no longer considered a planet. It was demoted from planet to a "dwarf planet" by the astronomers of the International Astronomical Union on August 24, 2006. It joins other dwarf planets such as Charon (Pluto's moon), Ceres (formerly an asteroid) and Xena (a body discovered in 2003 that is larger than Pluto and much farther from the Sun).
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Support for program number HST-ED-90285.01-A was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Copyright (c) 2007 Challenger Learning Center at Prairie Aviation Museum and Challenger Learning Center of Northwest Indiana. Staff of Challenger Learning Centers and instructors of classes involved with Challenger Learning Center missions may reproduce this WebQuest guide for classroom and educational purposes. Otherwise this work may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. This page is based upon the WebQuest model. |