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Weather Beyond Earth: Orbits and Giant Storms by the Numbers

Grade 8 solar system scale practice: use orbit data for ages, seasons and speeds, then compare giant storms on other planets with their worlds.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS1-3

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
12 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Circle the answer, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze orbit data to compare the distances, year lengths and speeds of the planets.
Students compare the sizes of storms on other planets with Earth and with their own planets.
Students use scale data to argue whether storms on other planets are small.

How to use

Read the passage together and check how to read each table, then let students work alone; allow calculators for the orbit and percent questions.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS1-3

Analyze data to find the scale properties of objects in the solar system.

Preview

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Name Date

Weather Beyond Earth: Orbits and Giant Storms by the Numbers

Use orbit and storm data to build a school weather app tab.

Part 1: Years, seasons and speeds

Read the passage and Table 1, then answer questions 1–6.

Adding a Sky Tab to the Weather App

1Every ten minutes, the weather station on the roof of Cedar Flats Middle School sends its readings to the school's weather app: temperature, wind speed, rainfall and air pressure. The eighth-grade weather club writes a short forecast each morning, and hundreds of families check it before the buses come. This fall the club decided to add a new tab called "Weather Beyond Earth." Club member Keoni Albright and the club's adviser, Ms. Ingrid Solberg, gathered data that space probes and telescopes have collected about the other planets.

2Keoni started with the planets' orbits. The distances in Table 1 are in astronomical units (AU). One AU is Earth's average distance from the Sun, about 150 million km. The "year" column tells how long a planet takes to travel once around the Sun, measured in Earth years. Keoni wanted the tab to show users their age on each planet and how long a season lasts there. For a simple model, the club splits each planet's year into four seasons of equal length, even though real seasons on some planets are uneven.

3Ms. Solberg suggested checking the speeds too. Each planet's orbit is close to a circle, so the length of one trip around the Sun is about 2 × 3.14 × the planet's distance from the Sun. Dividing that path by the time the trip takes gives the planet's average speed along its orbit.

4The second part of the tab shows giant weather systems. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an oval storm that telescopes have watched for more than 150 years, and it has slowly shrunk over that time. When the Voyager 2 probe flew past Neptune in 1989, it photographed a huge dark storm that later faded away. Around Saturn's north pole, a jet stream of fast winds wraps the clouds into a six-sided shape. Mars has no rain, but its winds can lift dust into storms that cover large regions, and sometimes the whole planet. Table 2 gives the width of one example of each, next to the width of a large hurricane on Earth.

5Keoni plans to draw each planet as a circle on the app screen, with its storm on top, at a scale where 1 mm on the screen stands for 2,000 km. "If the sizes are wrong," Ms. Solberg reminded him, "the picture teaches the wrong lesson."