Essay section planning & title changes

In a recent taught session I set out a plan of my essay and improved it by adding more specific parts to each individual section.

 In addition after taking into account feed back that I have received from my supervisor and centre coordinator I have changed the working title of my EPQ topic from
'How will cosmic rays affect the crew of a potential mars mission and how can they be protected from them?' to 
'To what extent will cosmic rays be a danger to a potential mars mission?'.
My previous title was too descriptive and limited the potential to evaluate, whereas my new title is more evaluative than descriptive and gives me the chance to broaden and improve my essay's eventual conclusion.

Recap of previous taught sessions

This update will be a summary of some of the skills I have learnt in my previous taught sessions:

Time Management:
In this session we learnt about ways of effectively managing our time by removing distractions and planning our work realistically.

Referencing and Plagiarism:
We learnt about why referencing is important in essays, when to reference and various methods of referencing such as the Harvard System. We also completed various activities on a tutorial about referencing from the Leeds University website.
We also learnt about the importance of wording sentences in our essay correctly and when to quote sources directly so we don't accidentally plagiarise.

Primary and Secondary Data:
In this sessions we learnt the difference between primary and secondary data and the benefits of using both when conducting research. We also learnt about what criteria to consider to when collecting primary data, and when it is suitable to use primary data.

Coherence When Writing:
We covered basic knowledge about the spelling and grammar, language and style we use when we write our essays.

More source research

This evening I spent about an hour completing more source research on my subject of cosmic rays' affect on manned space travel. 

I realised that the majority of the sources that I had collected so far were from NASA or affiliated scientists, so I decided that it would be useful to find sources from other space agencies such as the ESA in order to obtain a variety of data.

Today I mostly focused on finding current research into materials and methods of protecting astronauts from cosmic rays. I found several articles from the ESA on their research into materials that would protect from cosmic rays.

Title update, sources and source evaluation

After doing some preliminary research I have decided that evaluating different spacecraft propulsion systems wouldn't be a suitable study as there are simply too many types to evaluate. Furthermore, I could not find a suitable reason to only evaluate a select few either.

For my new topic I have decided to instead to research the effects of cosmic rays on the health of astronauts on a long distance space expedition, for example a mission to Mars.

There is suitable information available on the topic since NASA and other space agencies are currently deep in research about getting humans to Mars, and the issue of radiation protection is important.

I will divide my topic into several sections:

What are cosmic rays?:

 - describe different types

 - what are they and where do they come from

How do cosmic rays affect humans?:

 - List, describe and explain health effect

 - Cite various studies

How will the astronauts be protected?:

 - List current and developing methods

 - Evaluate and compare

Conclude and assess if a long distance mission is worth it considering the health risks coupled with available protection.

I have also done about two hours of source research for each of the sections and I am currently compiling a list of potential sources for my essay and I am assessing each source to make sure it is reliable and trustworthy.

Work from last Thursday's epq taught session

A mind map of areas to consider when researching and writing about my chosen topic.