Lesson .
.Orbit Observation: A ‘Pi in the Sky’ Math Challenge
Overview
The "Pi in the Sky" math challenge gives students a chance to take part in recent discoveries and upcoming celestial events, all while using math and pi just like NASA scientists and engineers. In this problem from the 11th set, students use pi to figure out how much data the NISAR spacecraft collects every day.
Materials
- Pi in the Sky 11: Orbit Observation worksheet – download PDF (for best results, download and print from Adobe Reader)
- Pi in the Sky 11: Orbit Observation answer key – download PDF
Background
Orbit Observation
The NISAR mission is an Earth orbiting satellite designed to study our planet's changing ecosystems. It will collect data about Earth's land- and ice-covered surfaces approximately every 6 days, allowing scientists to study changes at the centimeter scale – an unprecedented level of detail. To achieve this feat, NISAR will collect massive amounts of data. In Orbit Observation, students use pi to calculate how much data the NISAR spacecraft captures during each orbit of Earth.
Procedures
Orbit Observation
NISAR is an Earth-orbiting satellite mission designed to measure centimeter-scale movements and other changes of Earth's land- and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days – a scale of coverage and sampling never before achieved.
Using a technique called Synthetic Aperture Radar, NISAR will produce more than 85 terabytes of data products every day (1 TB = 1,000 gigabytes) that will allow scientists to better monitor and mitigate natural disasters and understand the effects of climate change.
NISAR has an imaging swath of 240 kilometers, but the ground track spacing is 231 km to allow overlap between swaths. Given that the Earth’s radius is 6,371 km, how many orbits are executed in one day? How much data is produced per orbit on average?
