This is an activity designed for groups of students to design a space telescope between them. While it could also be done individually the collaboration is a key part of the activity, and so groups of around 4 are recommended.

All the required information is presented in the “Student Guide”, so the groups should be able to complete the task without requiring Excel. They will need to work together to ensure that they do not choose conflicting requirements. The students do not need to be familiar with the details of space instrumentation, as that is all provided in the information.

There is a spreadsheet which can be run in Excel to allow the teacher to check whether their mission choice is valid for each level.

Files, including a Teacher Guide are available (in both Word and PDF format) in this Google Drive Folder.

There are 3 difficulty levels:

• Intermediate – intended for advanced 14-16 year old students
  • The basic activity. Students should design a space and complete the proposal letter.
  • There are more limited options than for advanced, and the cooling system merely requires them to select a temperature.
  • None of the maths is complicated, and does not exceed multiplication and addition – though there are a number of conditions which the students will need to check.
• Advanced – intended for post-16 students
  • In addition to the proposal letter, there are questions for each role to complete, which are included in the guide and linked to the curriculum.
  • There are additional options for the orbits, and the cooling system is more complex.
• Expert – intended for advanced post-16 students, or undergraduates
  • In addition to the proposal letter, there are calculations for the risk of (partial) failure and some contingencies for going over budget, which requires a basic knowledge of statistics and error calculation/propagation.
  • The cooling system requires a knowledge of the thermodynamics (latent heat etc.). Students may have to research the physical properties of helium, nitrogen etc.
  • There is no proposal template provided, as it is expected that students at this level can structure their own proposal.

The team must decide:

• The mirror size, quality and whether it is “deployable”.
• The wavelength coverage of the instruments on board and the type (camera of spectrometer).
• The cooling system(s) required by the telescope.
• The rocket and launch site to be used.
• The orbit it will observe from.
• The mission lifetime

There are a number of case studies suggested with a range of budgets – this should allow different groups to be given different targets, rather than be given completely free reign. The end product is a “mission proposal”, for which a template is provided. The case studies are (loosely) based on currently or past examples, and while the spreadsheet does  not allow infinite flexibility the masses and budgets of the best possible approximations to real telescopes are not too far off the real numbers (at least within a factor of two).

You may, of course, wish to design your own brief, based on those provided.

Syllabus links

The areas of the post-16 (e.g. A-level) syllabus covered by the activity are:

• Electromagnetic spectrum
• Black body temperature and Wein’s law
• Centripetal force
• Newton’s law of Gravity
• Radians and degrees
• Satellites and types of orbit
• Stars and galaxies
• Life cycle of stars
• Optics and telescopes