Credit: ESA
Packed onboard Europe's final space freighter to dock with the International Space Station is a small blue box.
It is not the most important payload onboard the "Georges Lemaître," the name that the European Space Agency (ESA) gave its fifth and last Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), but the box's contents represent the history that was made and the science that was advanced by the fleet of five spacecraft and their namesakes.
The kit, which was developed by ESA's education office, includes embroidered mission patches and matching lapel pins for each of the ATV flights to the International Space Station, including the Georges Lemaître, which arrived at the orbiting laboratory on Tuesday (Aug. 12) carrying more than seven tons of fuel, supplies and experiments.
With the exception of the items commemorating the first ATV mission in March 2008, each of the patches and pins for the four subsequent flights have the same design but differ in colour.
Beyond the souvenirs though, the small blue box contains five DVDs, each with a different educational video based on the five European visionaries whose names were used for the five space freighters.
"Jules Verne, Johannes Kepler, Edoardo Amaldi, Albert Einstein and Georges Lemaître form the inspiration to explain the principles of physics for young and old," ESA wrote on its website, describing the videos.
The box set launched to the space station is one of only 100 limited edition kits that were produced. ESA plans to further share the videos from the DVDs by posting them online during the Georges Lemaître mission.
"And this series of films aims to examine the scientific breakthroughs and visionary concepts that made history."
CREDIT: NASA/ESA
Beginning with Jules Verne, the pioneering French author of science fiction and namesake for ATV-1, the videos are themed around the scientific concepts that each luminary advanced.
For Verne, who penned "De la Terre à la Lune" ("From the Earth to the Moon"), ESA's film focuses on the science of leaving the Earth.
German astronomer Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion are represented on the set's second disc, devoted to "orbits and body motion in space" as they related to the flight of ATV-2.
ESA's third freighter (ATV-3), named for the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi, is featured in a video about the science of cosmic rays and space travel.
The film for ATV-4, the Albert Einstein, explores the iconic scientist's ideas about the "relativity of space and time."
Also, Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître's early work on what would later be known as the Big Bang theory is represented in ESA's video about the evolving universe.
Although not included with the box, ESA's education office is also introducing a new set of resources to compliment the kits.
ESA is distributing most of the remaining kits to schools, but has set aside five of the boxes to give away online.
To qualify for one of the limited edition kits, ESA is asking the public to create their own videos that both explain and demonstrate a law of physics, chemistry or biology and its relevance to space.
"Ideally the demonstrations should be practical to recreate in a classroom or outside safely but if you happen to have an MRI scanner in your garage and think you can use it to demonstrate the existence of dark matter, by all means send it in," ESA advises.
The deadline to enter the education challenge is Oct. 31, 2014.
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