This 'museum' project has been specially designed to complement and aid a trip to the Connected Earth gallery at the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station Experience. This project contains different activities, relating to the story of communications, and the displays at Goonhilly. These activities can be used before, during and after a visit to Goonhilly.
Worksheet 1A dummy's guide to Goonhilly
Before you visit Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, your task is to write a magazine-style article about what it is
and what happens there. To do this, you will have to carry out some research, using the following sources:
www.goonhilly.bt.com/ and http://www.connected-earth.com/ Your article needs to be upbeat, interesting, packed with facts and highly illustrated. Use the sources above to find the following specific information.
Worksheet 2Sat Stats
The first thing you will notice about Goonhilly are the huge satellite dishes. There are over 60 of them on the site altogether. The satellite dishes send and receive communications data such as phone calls and video signals to and from satellites in space. They handle a huge amount of traffic - more than 10 million phone calls a week!
Worksheet 3Cranking up the speed of communication
The story of telecommunication is the story of people speeding up the power of communication. From early days of horseback messengers to the breakthrough of the electric telegraph to the phone and email, communication has developed continuously, so that today we can send voices, text, images and video around the planet almost instantaneously.
Worksheet 4Hurry up Arthur!
When the first satellites were launched into space in the 1950s, Britain realised that it needed its own satellite earth station so that the satellites could be tracked and their communication signals picked up. The result was Goonhilly.
Visit our interactive Different types of satelliteorbit demonstration and try it for yourself. A new window will open.