In this classroom exercise, students will "build" a comet using representative materials. Learning outcomes, concepts, and a link to the comet "recipe" are provided. Safety tips, comet facts, and links to additional information are also included. Full description.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to explore the nature and composition of a comet. The student will select ingredients to create a comet and will learn to identify ingredients responsible for a comet nucleus, and how changes in the nucleus when the comet approaches the Sun cause two different kinds of tails to form. Students can explore some facts, myths, and legends linked to the appearance ... Full description.

This article describes how astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) have discovered thermal emission lines from interstellar water vapor using the spectrometers aboard ESA's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). Full description.

This NASA Module investigation compares and contrasts physical processes that occur on Both Earth and Mars. Students are given unidentified images of Earth and Mars. Their task is to arrange the images into pairs that show evidence of similar physical processes. Then they identify each image as one of Earth or of Mars by comparing and contrasting physical features that they observe in the image pairs. ... Full description.

This resource includes a classroom activity, background information and a set of temperature and surface pressure data from the Pathfinder Lander. Students analyze data on temperature and pressure graphs from the first 30 days of the Pathfinder Mission to determine whether water could have existed under these conditions. A set of 15 images is also available, which can be reproduced on a photocopier ... Full description.

This information about the Lunar Prospector mission to the Moon discusses the possibility that ice exists on the lunar surface. The article indicates that no native water ice has been found on the moon. If ice has been found, it most likely originated from meteors and meteorites which periodically bombard the lunar surface. Full description.

In this lesson, students learn about meteors, meteorites, and comets by reading and discussing a related New York Times article about the Leonid meteor showers and the methods that scientists are using to learn from these meteors. Students then create and observe a comet in their classroom. Full description.

This website presents the story of Comet LINEAR, which broke apart in 2000, revealing what many scientists thought all along - water in Earth's oceans could have come from outer space. The article discusses findings from the breakup of Comet LINEAR and the possibility of water in its composition. Full description.

This site presents clues to suggest that liquid water once flowed on Mars - raising hopes that life could have arisen there - but the evidence remains inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. Full description.

This is a copy of a news story originally written on March 1, 2001 that describes the theory of how small comets may have been at least part of the source of the water on our planet. The site also offers links to the University of Iowa's Small Comets research site and information on the ground-based measurements that are used to identify these comets. Full description.