Cooking with Kuiper: Project Supply Chart

December 27, 2012| cometary| 0 Comment | 6:05 am

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Hands-On Science

All Lined Up for Comet Building

(Update: 2/18/2015)

As mentioned in the notes for project leaders, it’s best to repeat the procedure at least twice–three times if the class is large, to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate in the “safe” portions of the activity and to produce a variety of comets to observe.

Purchase dry ice in advance by as much as a day (purchase at the higher end of the quantity range if you need to store it overnight) and store wrapped in insulating material, but not tightly sealed. (Frozen CO2 will sublime to gas and can even explode a container that is sealed too tightly.) A small non-airtight cooler tucked into another lightly-closed, non-airtight cooler works fine, especially if wrapped in a blanket and stored in a cool location.

For the ice-cream topping, choose a small bottle with a squirt-style top full of caramel- or chocolate-flavor syrup for ice-cream sundaes. Do NOT purchase hard-shell toppings; stick to sticky sugar syrups. Be prepared to fend off requests to sample the syrup.

For ammonia, do not use pure ammonia; simply choose a basic non-sudsy ammonia-based cleanser. A “sport-top” (squirting-style) water bottle about half-full of ammonia works well and keeps the ammonia away from hands, eyes, and clothing. However, be sure to clearly label the bottle with the contents.

For trash bags, choose a good, sturdy brand. They’ll take significant abuse!

Please note carefully that most equipment is required to be either plastic or wood.

	Per comet	For about 3-4 comets, allowing for waste and failures	Estimated cost (2015 prices)
Good sturdy “tall kitchen” garbage bag, cut down one long edge to make a liner for the bowl	1	2 (have a second on hand in case the original tears)	$0.50 ($12 for box of 45)
Additional “tall kitchen” garbage bags	3 Open the bags and layer them one inside the other, to create a triple-thick bag	6 Have a second layered set of 3 bags on hand in case of tears	$1.50 ($12 for box of 45)
Large plastic mixing bowl, 2-cup plastic measuring cup, tablespoon measure, large wooden spoon	1 of each Reminder: for safety, use plastic containers and a wooden spoon	1 of each	Bring from home or borrow from volunteers
Water	2 cups	2 quarts on hand (store in a pitcher for measuring out in 2-cup quantities)	n/a
Sand or fine gravel	2 tablespoons	½ cup	zero
Ammonia	One squirt (about 1 tablespoon)	½ cup	$1.50 ($10 for 28-ounce bottle)
Ice-cream topping	One squirt (about 1 tablespoon)	About ½ cup (Bring at least a 4-ounce container of syrup.)	$6.50
Dry ice	2 cups of dry ice, after crushing.	About 7-10 pounds of dry ice.	$15($1.50 per pound)
Safety goggles	1 pair, adult size 1-2 pair, adult or child size (depending on student age)	1 pair, adult size 1-2 pair, adult or child size (depending on student age)	If not available in classroom—one-time purchase for reuse in many projects. $5 each
Heavy work gloves	1 pair, to fit Project Leader	1 pair, to fit Project Leader	Use own gloves or borrow from volunteer (a new pair would cost about $10-12)
Total Cost:			$39.50

For an easy-to-print version: Just Supplies Cooking with Kuiper

You might also like to read:

Chasing Comets: Supplies & ResourcesChasing Comets: Supplies & Resources

Supplies and Materials

Below, you’ll find a handy supply document you can download, with shopping lists for small and large groups and a range of cost estimates, depending on how much of the supplies you can acquire from available supplies or donations by participants. With a minimal outlay, you and your group can experience being comet chasers–observers of comets.

Basically, you need a bunch of badminton birdies for your comet heads—keep in mind you don’t need performance-grade shuttlecocks or even new ones. If your high school has a badminton team, they will have worn-out birdies you can take off their hands. A grungy, beat-up birdie makes a more realistic comet head.

Birdies for Comets

And you need a bunch of ribbon—curling ribbon for the comet tails. The supply sheet estimates ribbon packages at around $8, but if you look at this photo, you’ll see the last time I bought supplies, it was out of the clearance bin at $2. And if you can get one in five of your participants to bring in a roll to share, it won’t cost you a dime.

Zoom Out–Yes! Here’s All You Need To Make Comets

The one oddball item is that tulle fabric ribbon for the big comet. This you might have a hard time finding in your junk drawer unless you’ve been helping a bride make wedding tchochkes. But for $10 you can buy enough to make three huge comets. Cut five-yard lengths and tie one end of each to a vane of a single birdie, allowing a few inches of extra length to fan out as the comet’s “coma”. Tulle scrunches up easily, so even a six-inch-wide ribbon will feed through the holes between the birdie’s vanes.

Detail–How To Tie Fabric Tails

You should be able to borrow a portable fan and a playground or soccer ball. If you can’t, it will take a roughly $25 expenditure to get those items in stock—a cost you can recoup in part by either donating it to the group you’re working with or simply deducting the expense as part of your cost of volunteering.

And it is presumed you can find a pencil, which makes holding the small model a little easier when you’re doing the demo with the fan; here’s the trick for hooking the pencil to the comet head:

Holder For Fan Experiment

Depending on how good you are at scrounging supplies and locating soccer balls, your costs will range from $10 to $85 for typical group sizes. The spreadsheet I use has a calculation column to adjust the requirements list for other class sizes So, if you want a copy of this fully-functional workbook, “like” the Facebook page & I’ll send you one via a Facebook “message”. (You can also try emailing me through the “contacts” page here, but you’ll get a faster response on FB.) Your FB contact will be used for nothing other than sending you a file and boosting the “likes”-count on my page. [Insert maniacal laughter, if desired.]

Meanwhile, you can get the static workbook as a pdf right away:

Just Supplies Chasing Comets

Resources and References

Now that you are all excited about comets, here are some fun places to go where you can find more cometary material:

A lovely one-page summary from the Spaceguard Program (sponsored by the European Space Agency) gives a clear description of comet tail structure and dynamics, including a neat animation of what both tails look like as the comet proceeds around the sun. The ion tail streams straight back, while the dust tail is curved a bit as the particles within the dust tail blend movement due to their individual orbits about the sun and the forces of the radiation pressure. Net, both tails roughly point away from the sun, as in our demonstration.

Sweet page from NASA with helpful animations and clear descriptions.

Follow the European Space Agency’s comet-chasing spacecraft, Rosetta, as it aims for the first robotic landing on a cometary nucleus.

Read this: a “real” science article with a good set of detailed discussions of the types of comet tails and how they work.

Or, try this excellent piece by freelance science writer Craig Freidenrich on the inner workings of comets.

The Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing’s educational site helps with details on the structure of comets.

Explore a public-domain catalog of Solar System images, from Hubble and other spacefarers.

Discover how Oort clouds may be one way star systems interact directly with one another, because the Oort clouds project so far out.

See the invisible part of a comet.

Find out all about radiation pressure.

Plan to catch sight of the meteor shower sponsored by Comet Halley.

Explore the origins of comets at this UC Berkeley site.

Check out NASA’s solar system photo gallery, with images from NASA and European Space Agency exploration missions and telescopes.

Visit the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s educational site, with even more hands-on activities for young astrophysicists. Roam their site for educator workshops and more.

OK, seriously, I’m not the only science blogger keen on comets.

A new comet is incoming this month (May 2014).

Our guy Euler was the first one to suggest that light exerts pressure, but we had to wait over 100 years to get to Maxwell, who proved it, and then another quarter-century went by before some Russians managed to measure radiation pressure. (Also, gotta love Google Books.)

Oh, and by 1915 the proof of radiation pressure made it into Scientific American.

Gravity & EnergyGravity & Energy

This category of the blog is dedicated to science & technology topics that I think may interest my fellow nerds.

(Note: Original post: 2012. A few updates were made during site reorganization in January, 2021.)

For starters, I’ll be posting in the blog regularly under Astronomy & Astrophysics. (In some of these older posts the category is tagged Pixel Gravity.) To jump straight to those posts, visit the PG Archive–readily accessible in the menu. For some time now, I’ve been running the social-media support for the program that made the picture you see here. I’ve been posting about robots, space exploration, astronomy, big steps in physics, and so on. Sometimes, the space available for a posting on Facebook is too restrictive. So those kinds of discussions will move here.

What qualifies me to write about this stuff? Well, I’ve admitted elsewhere that we are a family of hypernerds. That’s not my term. It was invented and applied by one of our charming (adult) offspring. It’s not a misnomer As a family, we are 40% engineers and 60% scientists.

I’m a power systems engineer, which in my case means I’ve made a career out of simulating how power plants and electric and gas networks operate.

My husband is a computational physicist, specializing in solar physics. Want to know what’s going on inside the sun? He’s your guy.

Our youngest son is too busy for now, building catapults and robots on his way to a mechanical-engineering degree at UC Santa Barbara. (Update: graduated, with honors. Currently open to job offers.)

After two summer internships in NASA’s astrobiology group, our middle son is working on an honors thesis project on metabolic processes of microbes in deep serpentine wells, attracted by the prospect of doing biology fieldwork in extreme ecosystems right here on planet Earth. (Update: he’s now nearly done with his Ph.D.)

And the oldest escaped from UC Berkeley’s astrophysics program with a degree and a desire to never return to academia. He built Pixel Gravity instead.

What’s “Pixel Gravity“? It’s a detailed, graphical astrophysics simulator with real-time controls. It looks sort of like a game, and it’s fun to play with, but it’s also a serious science tool As an “n‑body” simulator, it lets users model complex groups of many objects, from the solar system to galaxies. Most of the other easy-to-use programs available online limit the number of objects or lack physical accuracy, so (for example) relativistic effects on motion near a black hole are not handled properly, if at all. University researchers have access to extremely-detailed models, but those require supercomputers. Pixel Gravity provides accurate modeling on personal computers and is priced low so that even students can explore gravity in action. In addition to Newtonian gravity, Pixel Gravity models the additional effects of atmospheric drag, general relativity, and dark-matter, as well as user-defined forces. Plus, the software package includes helpful tools for curriculum development such as a tutorial-builder and video-production capability. (Update: Pixel Gravity is at present a retired product–contact us if you’d like a copy to play with.)

So, in short, the topics under this heading are just the kind of things we talk about at our house. So if you come to dinner, you don’t need to bring a foodie specialty. But you might scan the latest issue of Scientific American.

Messy Monday: Science Projects for Kids, Teachers, and Parent HelpersMessy Monday: Science Projects for Kids, Teachers, and Parent Helpers

Welcome to the first official posting under this new category. In these installments, I’ll be sharing science projects developed over many years while serving as The Science Mom at my local elementary school and in a community after-school program. When my friend Jean Southland and I first started the in-class projects, the teacher invited us in on Mondays, to create a fun activity for that worst-of-days to students, the First Day of the School Week. We fooled around with ideas to give this extra science class a name and settled on Jean’s simple and inviting “Messy Monday”. Since then, Jean moved on to wider-scale education duties, from teaching to administration, and she is now head of a local charter school. In the meantime, I continued with developing classroom-scale science projects and coaching a small robotics team.

When the youngest of my kids finally moved on from elementary school and my geek needs were being satisfied by playing with robots, I felt twinges of guilt that I was leaving the next round of students in the lurch. The most-frequent comments I heard when running science project sessions could be summarized as: “I could never do that”. Sometimes it was the teacher, in which case she/he would mean “I can’t spare the time to figure out supply lists, shop for stuff, sort out materials, and test procedures.” Other times, it was another parent, in which case the meaning was either “I could do that, if only someone would explain what it’s supposed to mean” or “I understand the science, but someone needs to give me a checklist to follow.” And in these times, potential cost is always a concern, as most supplemental projects—from field trips to science experiments—end up being funded by parents or from teachers’ own pockets.

In these episodes, I’ll be having a stab at meeting both sets of needs. With any luck, the end result will be a book of “recipes” for science projects with enough information provided for teachers to slot into their curricula in order to satisfy the science standards they must meet, with clear supply lists to distribute to classroom-helper parents, and with step-by-step instructions for completing projects that any interested parent or teacher will be able to not only follow but build upon to suit their own audiences. While (like every other blog in the Known Universe) the ultimate result is to be a book of projects that a teacher or parent helper could have at hand, in the short term, there will be first, these erratic blog entries and second, a series of leaflet-style e-docs in a more readable/printable form, to be available from the usual e-book suppliers. Think of the blog entries as the beta version, the leaflets as the Basic Edition release, and the eventual book as the Portmanteau Edition, with updates, extensions, and add-on packs as needed.

To open the subject, I’ll be delivering a flurry of quick posts to get things started, but then will back off to a more regular pace. The goal is to deliver one project-worth of information in no more than two weeks.

Every Messy Monday project guide has four key components:

A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.

So, let’s get started with a truly cometary project…