Gingerbread Cassini

Major portions of a spacecraft can be easily modeled using edible components. In this activity, students “construct” an edible “spacecraft” featuring some of the major components of the real thing. As illustrated, the Cassini spacecraft features a large dish antenna for communicating with Earth mounted on the main body of the spacecraft. A long boom out the side carries a magnetometer, an extremely sophisticated compass for measuring the direction and strength of a planetary magnetic field. It represents one of many scientific instruments aboard. Sun sensors near the main antenna represent one of the engineering subsystems on the spacecraft.