NASA Parachute Activity – Will Your Egg Go ‘Splat’?
If you attended primary school in Australia, it’s quite possible that your teacher ran a science activity for your class that involved designing a container that would (in theory) protect an egg when you dropped it from a height.
The trend lives on for today’s students, with Egg Drop Challenges continuing to be popular across the country.
As a child, I remember nervously climbing up a few steps of the fire escape at my primary school with my handmade egg carton creation in hand and my trusting egg nestled inside amongst cotton wool padding – ready to hold out my hand and drop it from a couple of meters in the air and hoping it would survive upon impact.
From memory, no such luck. As evidenced by a resounding ‘Crack!’ and ‘Splat!’
The carton, cotton wool, and sticky tape proved to be a poor solution for landing the egg safely to the ground.
The team at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), whose job it is to send large payloads to Mars, also need solutions for dropping objects from large heights without them going ‘crack’ or ‘splat’. And the stakes are a bit higher than the few steps of the primary school fire escape.
To get an idea of the work they do at NASA and how they come up with solutions to this problem, they created a short video showcasing some pretty impressive engineering solutions for testing our Mars-like conditions here on Earth.
An activity to do at home
To help children design and test parachute landing systems and successfully land their payloads on a target, NASA has come up with an activity that parents can try at home, or teachers can use in the classroom.
It’s called the Parachute Design Activity and it forms part of the Primary + STEM team’s curated selection of Teaching Resources.
You can find over a hundred STEM activities on the Primary + STEM website.
The goal of the Parachute Design Activity is to help children design a parachute solution that will guide the payload towards a target as slowly and as softly as possible.
One of the things that the activity teaches children is the process of iterative design. When they try out their first design, they can then make changes to it, and continually improve it, until they reach their optimum design solution to achieve their goal of landing the payload on the target.
The NASA teaching resource recommends the following materials to complete the activity:
- Plastic trash bags
- String (or similar)
- Tissue paper
- Large paper napkins
- A ‘payload’ i.e. something your parachute will carry
- Tape
And it’s recommended to have a notebook and pen on hand to record your results and reflections.
Share your activity experience
If you try this out at home, we’d love to see pictures of your parachute designs! You can send images through to primaryandstem@gmail.com along with any advice for other aspiring parachute engineers so we can share them on the website.
Information for teachers
The Parachute Design Activity provides an authentic problem for students to engage with, based on NASA landing spacecraft, safely and softly on Mars and other planets/bodies in the solar system.
In the Parachute Design Activity, students will design and test parachute landing systems to successfully land a probe on target. After testing, students can optimize their parachutes by experimenting with different materials and shapes for their parachute
This activity has been mapped to the Victorian curriculum:
- Curriculum code: Design & Technologies > Levels F to 2 > Engineering principles and systems > VCDSTC014
- Learning area: F-10: Design and Technologies