Last week (22/06/23), Dr Richard Greenwood visited Europa School UK in Culham, Abingdon, bringing a case, containing all sorts of exciting meteorites . Europa School is a multilingual, IB Diploma state school, which offers lessons in both English and a foreign language (French, German or Spanish). Richard, who teaches Chemistry to Sixth-Form students at the…
On Wednesday 25th January Simon Sheridan visited Stoke Goldington C of E First School. Simon organised a fun session, in which the children spent the afternoon investigating how the size and speed of meteroids (that’s meteorites before they hit the ground) affect the size and shape of craters. The session was rounded off with the children getting a chance…
On Monday 23rd January Simon Sheridan visited Beachborough School in Westbury. The day was spent working through a series of experiments to test soils and determine which was the most Mars-like. Finally, at the end of the day Simon gave a talk about meteorites and the children had a chance to get hands-on with Gibeon.…
Simon Sheridan visited Woodford Green Primary School on Friday as part of the Tim Peake Primary Project. Simon’s presentation not only involved showing students the outreach meteorite collection, but also included a crater-making activity. Simon made quite an impact himself, with the Year 5 class teacher Mrs Jones quoted in the Guardian* as saying: “It was…
After travelling millions of miles through space to reach the Earth, the meteorites in the outreach collection made a further trip to Scotland last week (April 28th and 29th). Following a brief presentation on the origins of different types of meteorites, members of the Troon and Sterling astronomical societies had hands-on encounters with the meteorites…
The outreach meteorites made two visits to Ware, Hertfordshire in the last couple of weeks, supporting presentations given by Michael Goodyear. One of Michael’s talks was for the University of the Third Age (U3A) and the other to a local geology club. In both cases, the talks were not specifically about meteorites, but about what meteorites…
The OU’s outreach meteorite collection was one of the star attractions at The Open University’s Parliamentary Showcase in the House of Commons on Wednesday 9 March. The event, attended by MPs, Lords and Senior Civil Servants was an opportunity to showcase the science and education benefits of space science research at the Open University. The…
On 26th February Diane Turner visited Pendragon Pre-school in Papworth Everard to kick-start their project on space. The children (including Diane’s twins) were able to identify Earth, the Moon and Mars and compared rocks from Earth with the lunar and Nakhla meteorites from the Open University outreach meteorite collection. There were excited discussions on how…
On Friday 27 November Simon Sheridan gave a talk about the Rosetta Mission to the Norwich Astronomical Society at their Seething Observatory. There were well over 100 people in the audience and after the talk he had a very lively hands-on session with the Open University outreach meteorite collection. The audience were extremely enthusiastic and…
On Monday 16 November Dr Simon Sheridan was invited back to his Junior School in Nottingham to talk to the current children about space science and jobs in the space industry.He ran three, hour-long workshops where the children performed experiments to investigate the effect of impacts on the Earth. The sessions ended with the children…
On 12th November Dr Andrew Morse of the Open University’s Department of Physical Sciences and a member of the ESA Rosetta team gave a presentation entitled: “Rosetta – Landing on a comet” to Eton College Scientific Society. The event was attended by approximately eighty pupils from both Eton College and Windsor Boys’ School. Dr Andrew…
On the 9th October Dr. Andrew Morse gave a presentation to about 100 year 12 pupils of Castle Rushen High school. The presentation was about the Rosetta mission and the engineering challenges overcome on its 10 year journey to land on a comet. The presentation also included handling the DPS meteorites collection. This was followed…
The Chelyabinsk “superbolide” exploded over Russia at 9.20am on 15th February 2013, causing extensive damage and making news headlines across the globe.Huge amounts of extraterrestrial material were collected on the ground in the days that followed this massive explosion. This debris is officially classified as being from the Chelyabinsk meteorite, and has the composition of an…
On 23rd September the Open University hosted the annual visit of sixth-formers and their teachers from the schools in the Ogden Trust Schools-University partnership. As in previous years the students visited various research labs and enjoyed a demonstration of meteorites by Roy Adkin Roy Adkin talks meteorites to Wellingborough sixth-formers
I took an unusual and rather special collection of meteorites to Walton High (Walnut Tree, Milton Keynes), not the usual collection taken to OUTREACH events, which was as exciting for me as for the pupils! A piece of the infamous Chelyabinsk meteorite, Campo del Cielo, lunar and Martian samples and a huge 12 kg, as…
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