Exploring space: tools, crews and what we learn

This lesson asks you to analyse the impact that conditions in space have on the people who explore it and how they meet their needs there, to assess the role of space-exploration technology in observing and understanding environmental changes on Earth, and to identify technologies used in space exploration and describe how innovations have contributed to our understanding of space. The museum offers an astrolabe plate of earlier sky-watchers, a scientist who worked with photographs of the Moon and satellite images of the Earth, and one astronaut's days on the International Space Station; the class brings today's telescopes, probes, satellites and stations and what each has taught us, which the museum does not hold. ¹

For each technology or person you read about, write what it let someone do or see that was harder before, what the record says about the needs of the people involved, and what it does not say.

The difficulty was not absence of earlier astronomical instruments: an ordinary astrolabe's horizon was drawn on a plate associated with a particular latitude, and moving north or south changes the horizon's relationship to the celestial sphere, requiring a suitable plate ^{2 3}. The universal plate addresses a design question: could a different representation allow one disc to serve multiple latitudes? ⁴ The record on al-Zarqali's plate adds that a person still chooses the inputs and reads the marks ⁴.

Roser Puig describes al-Zarqali as a Toledan instrument maker who taught himself astronomy and worked with Said al-Andalusi under the city's ruler al-Mamun ⁵. Puig reports a 14th-century Egyptian witness to a lost work by Said: al-Zarqali constructed an instrument called al-zarqala for al-Mamun in 1048/1049 and wrote 100 chapters on its use ⁵. The record gives a patron and a use; it preserves no sentence in which al-Zarqali states his own reason.

The word "universal" can sound like an instrument that finds your place and the hour by itself. The record says universal means applicable across latitudes, not a machine that discovers location and time without knowledge or interpretation ⁴.

Al-Zarqali's plate lets one disc serve several latitudes, and El-Baz used images taken from satellites to study deserts. What does each technology let a person work out that was harder before, and why?

• Al-Zarqali's universal astrolabe plate: the plate, the ruler for the horizon and what "universal" does not mean.
• Risalat al-Mizzi on the astrolabe: what the treatise covers, from altitudes to prayer times.
• Farouk El-Baz: Apollo landing sites, astronaut training and satellite images of deserts.
• Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor: the October 2007 flight to the station and the guidebook that went with it.

Read the card on the universal astrolabe plate. Write one sentence on what problem its design solved for the observer, then one on a space technology you know and the problem it solves.