This series of activities from NASA take a mathematical approach to looking at black holes. They are intended as supplementary problems for students looking for additional challenges in the maths and physical science post-16 curriculum. Problems consist of a student page and an answer sheet. Students need to be...

In this activity, students create colour images from satellite data. This allows them to study how different surfaces reflect different wavelengths of light, how coloured images are created using an RGB model, and how band combinations can be chosen to examine a particular landscape effectively.

Mathematics plays a vital part in space flight, it gives us a way both to predict what should happen in the future and also ways to measure what’s actually happening in the present, and adapt to it. In this resource we look at a few places where maths helps in space flight. The maths is made simple here (it’s far,...

The premise of this activity is that the school is sending a rover to Mars. Its mission is to search for evidence that life has ever existed there. It is the job of the class to decide where the rover should land on Mars. They will do this by working in groups and investigating six potential landing sites and...

In order to understand the orbits of planets, comets and other celestial bodies, it is necessary to examine the principles of how gravity, and the velocity of an object, interact to produce an orbit. It is a common misconception among students that planetary orbits are circular. This practical activity gives a...

From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics for Education and Industry (MEI), this activity for post-16 students demonstrates that coffee cools gradually because it is hotter than room temperature and heat is lost to the room. Mixing the coffee with milk also cools it but this effect is...

From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by MEI, this series of activities explores how mechanical oscillations are important in many areas of everyday life. Sometimes they are useful, for example the motion of the suspension on a car, sometimes they...

This activity allows students to investigate how images are produced from data streams by using first a spreadsheet and then an image-processing program. They then go on to see how the usefulness of such a monochromatic image may be enhanced by using lookup tables and calibration. The materials used focus on the...