Space conquest is a very attractive subject. Who didn’t dream about being an astronaut even once in his or her life? Recently, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet spent almost 200 days in the ISS. As a French science teacher, I saw a chance to get my students interested in a lot of topics. In this article, we will expose a method that can be used to determine the orbital inclination of the ISS using a smartphone. It can be performed by even the youngest students. Moreover, the results of this experiment will allow you to answer a question that one of them asked me: “Why does the ISS track looks like a sine wave on a world map?”
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© 2019 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2019
American Association of Physics Teachers
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