National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Goddard Space Flight Center
Space Weather Action Center
Standards Connection
Technology:
- Students use technology to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of sources.
Mathematics Standards (NCTM):
- Develop an understanding of large numbers and recognize and appropriately use exponential, scientific, and calculator notation.
- Represent, analyze, and generalize a variety of patterns with tables, graphs, words, and, when possible, symbolic rules.
Transfer of Energy:
- The sun is a major source of energy for changes on the earth's surface. The sun loses energy by emitting light.
- A tiny fraction of that light reaches the earth, transferring energy from the sun to the earth.
- The sun's energy arrives as light with a range of wavelengths, consisting of visible light, infrared, and ultraviolet radiation.
Earth in the Solar System:
- The Earth is the third planet from the sun in a system that includes the moon, the sun, eight other planets and their moons, and smaller objects, such as asteroids and comets.
- The sun, an average star, is the central and largest body in the solar system.
- Most objects in the solar system are in regular and predictable motion. Those motions explain such phenomena as the day, the year, phases of the moon, and eclipses.
Nature of Science:
- Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models.
- Although all scientific ideas are tentative and subject to change and improvement in principle, for most major ideas in science, there is much experimental and observational confirmation. Those ideas are not likely to change greatly in the future. Scientists do and have changed their ideas about nature when they encounter new experimental evidence that does not match their existing explanations.
History of Science:
- Many individuals have contributed to the traditions of science. Studying some of these individuals provides further understanding of scientific inquiry, science as a human endeavor, the nature of science, and the relationships between science and society.
About the Standards Connections:
The Standards Connections are based on establishing a Space Weather Action Center, following the flip chart to analyze data, recording and summarizing the data, making predictions, communicating the prediction as a space weather report and using green screen technology to deliver the report.
The activities that are outlined in the Teacher's Guide are designed to be very flexible, however if the Space Weather Action Center is used as an on-going activity throughout the school year students will discover multiple opportunities for further exploration and research meeting required skills beyond the standard connections we have provided.
Space Weather Action Centers are designed to allow your students to monitor the progress of an entire solar storm from the time it erupts from the sun and eventually sweeps past our small planet effecting enormous changes in our magnetic field. To be able to accomplish this, students must be able to:
- Predict which sunspots may be a source of solar storms.
- Discover when solar storms occur and predict which ones will affect Earth.
- Measure disturbances to Earth's magnetic field and predict auroras.
- Know when to watch for auroras, from their data analysis.