Chapter 12 Rings, Moons, and Pluto
12.7 Collaborative Group Activities and Exercises
Collaborative Group Activities
- Imagine it’s the distant future and humans can now travel easily among the planets. Your group is a travel agency, with the task of designing a really challenging tour of the Galilean moons for a group of sports enthusiasts. What kinds of activities are possible on each world? How would rock climbing on Ganymede, for example, differ from rock climbing on Earth? (If you design an activity for Io, you had better bring along very strong radiation shielding. Why?)
- In the same spirit as Activity A, have your agency design a tour that includes the seven most spectacular sights of any kind on all the moons or rings covered in this chapter. What are the not-to-be-missed destinations that future tourists will want to visit and why? Which of the sights you pick are going to be spectacular if you are on the moon’s surface or inside the ring, and which would look interesting only from far away in space?
- In this chapter we could cover only a few of the dozens of moons in the outer solar system. Using the Internet or your college library, organize your group into a research team and find out more about one of the moons we did not cover in detail. Our favorites include Uranus’ Miranda, with its jigsaw puzzle surface; Saturn’s Mimas, with a “knockout” crater called Herschel; and Saturn’s Iapetus, whose two hemispheres differ significantly. Prepare a report to attract tourists to the world you selected.
- In a novel entitled 2010, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, inspired by the information coming back from the Voyager spacecraft, had fun proposing a life form under the ice of Europa that was evolving toward intelligence. Suppose future missions do indeed find some sort of life (not necessarily intelligent but definitely alive) under the ice of Europa—life that evolved completely independently from life on Earth. Have your group discuss what effect such a discovery would have on humanity’s view of itself. What should be our attitude toward such a life form? Do we have an obligation to guard it against contamination by our microbes and viruses? Or, to take an extreme position, should we wipe it out before it becomes competitive with Earth life or contaminates our explorers with microorganisms we are not prepared to deal with? Who should be in charge of making such decisions?
- In the same spirit as Activity D, your group may want to watch the 2013 science fiction film Europa Report. The producers tried to include good science in depicting what it would be like for astronauts to visit that jovian moon. How well does your group think they did?
- A number of modern science fiction writers (especially those with training in science) have written short stories that take place on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There is a topical listing of science fiction stories with good astronomy at http://www.astrosociety.org/scifi. Members of your grou