Introduction

Space travel offers engineers some of the best proving grounds of the basic physics discovered by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.  While solutions to the issues that arise may be sophisticated and complex the underlying physics is rudimentary enough to be studied in grade school.  Launch and travel trajectory certainly offer their own challenges; however, once you have a spacecraft on route, one of the biggest problems is landing where you want to and landing safely. 

Today you will be Space Engineers and we will have to wrestle with these problems. 

In the window below take a look at some of the considerations that NASA and JPL engineers addressed in landing Spirit and Opportunity, two land based rovers, on Mars safely in 2004.  

Objective

There are plans to land rovers on Mars in the future and we will be tasked with running some tests to ensure that the rover will land safely in the location we would like it to land.

We will apply Problem Based Learning (PBL), as described in Nature, to solve some problems involving landing a space craft on another planet.  In essence we will be space engineers for a day.  First review the four steps and then proceed to the first challenge.

Overview of Problem Based Learning

Step 1: Define the problem.
The teacher confronts the students with a plausible hypothetical problem. The teacher should do prior research to verify that material is available and suitable for students to research the problem.

Step2: Propose hypotheses.
Hypotheses are hunches or educated guesses about possible solutions. In problem-based learning, students form hypotheses based on group discussion, previous knowledge, and any information acquired up to that point. Through the course of the problem-based exercise, hypotheses will be continually evaluated and may be rejected, corroborated, synthesized, or modified. New ones may also be proposed as incoming data is evaluated.

Step 3: Gather and evaluate information.
With their hypotheses providing direction, students may explore print, Internet, and multimedia sources to acquire data. An important aspect of gathering information is evaluation. Is the material relevant? Is it current? Are the sources unbiased and is the information they provide accurate?

Step 4: Synthesis and solutions.
Students develop their solutions. Discussion of the various solutions may follow, and synthesis and consensus may be used to come up with a solution that effectively incorporates important points from more than one point of view. They may include video and multimedia, graphic displays, photographs, artwork, performance, as well as written and oral components. Students may then be invited to write papers on their own positions, and how they may have changed from when the problem was first proposed.