NASA

These activities comprise a series of 20 practical mathematics applications in space science. This collection of activities is based on a weekly series of space science problems distributed to teachers during the 2004-2005 school year. The problems in this booklet investigate space weather phenomena and math applications such as solar flares, satellite orbit decay, magnetism, the Pythagorean Theorem, order of operations and probability. The problems are authentic glimpses of modern engineering issues that arise in designing satellites to work in space. Each word problem has background information providing insight into the basic phenomena of the sun-Earth system, specifically space weather. The one-page assignments are accompanied by teacher pages with answer keys.