This 'museum' project has been designed for 14-16 year olds to complement and support 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 1How do satellites stay up?
Imagine climbing a huge tower up above the atmosphere. Take some tennis balls and a racket up with you (wearing your spacesuit, of course). If you drop a ball, it falls to Earth (1). But what if you hit it parallel to the ground? It will still curve down because of the pull of gravity, but as it hurtles along, the ground will be curving away underneath it (2). If you had a really good serve, you could hit the ball so hard that it would never come down. It would still be falling, but the ground would always be dropping away from it (3). Your ball would be in orbit, and you’d need to be ready to duck when it came all the way round the Earth and past you again! This is exactly how satellites stay in orbit.
There are two worksheets to choose from aimed at foundation and higher learning.
Worksheet 2Goonhilly and the electromagnetic spectrum
The satellite dishes at Goonhilly are sending and receiving vast amounts of information in the form of
microwaves. Travelling at the speed of light, these have a shorter wavelength than radio waves and
therefore a higher frequency, measured in the Gigahertz range. The higher the frequency, the greater the
amount of information that can be carried.
There are two worksheets to choose from aimed at foundation and higher learning.
Worksheet 3How do fibre optic cables work?
As well as the satellite dishes, Goonhilly uses fibre optic cables to transmit and receive enormous amounts of data around the world. Most of the phone calls, faxes, e-mails and other Internet traffic that Goonhilly handles actually travels along these cables rather than via satellite. The biggest cable, SEA-ME-WE3, links to networks as far away as Australia and Japan.
There are two worksheets to choose from aimed at foundation and higher learning.
Worksheet 4It's a Digital World!
More and more communications systems like TV, mobile phones, land phones and radio have been switching from analogue technology to digital. What’s the difference, and why is the world going digital?
There are two worksheets to choose from aimed at foundation and higher learning.
These activities can be used before, during and after a visit to Goonhilly, supporting and reinforcing learning in the context of a visit
Pre Visit
Museum projects secondary:
Goonhilly Science Project
Post Visit
Museum projects secondary:
Goonhilly Science Project
