Celebrate the beginning of Dawn’s year-long exploration of new worlds. After close to four years cruising at stunning speeds, the robotic spacecraft is catching up to its first destination in the main asteroid belt: Vesta. Don’t Dawn and Vesta deserve a fiesta?Yes! Vesta Fiestas will rock the nation – one may be yours! Join the celebration by hosting an event with your class, school club, your community, or a local museum. Visit the mission’s website for on-going cool connections with Dawn mission scientists, opportunities for networking with a local observatory, materials for recruiting fiesta-goers, and great activities for the party itself.
Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.
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NASA Explorer Schools educator Cheryl May at Lebanon Middle School challenged her 7th-grade science and technology students by adding her own extensions to the Sun-Earth-Moon Model activity. In the activity, students create a model of the Earth, sun and moon system. Students observe the moon’s orbit of Earth simultaneously with Earth’s orbit of the sun. This is an effective way to model eclipses and the position of Earth, the moon and the sun during the moon’s phases.
NASA Explorer Schools educator Elizabeth Petry from Mack Benn Jr. Elementary School used NES resources to encourage her students to read and write. Students began their adventure by participating in a videoconference activity in which they explored the solar system. Afterward, students conducted research and prepared a fact to share about their planet as part of a Reader’s Theater activity. Petry showed the NASA Now program, “Reasons for the Seasons,” and arranged for students to participate in a NASA Digital Learning Network videoconference, Our Solar Neighborhood.
NASA Explorer Schools invites K-12 students across the United States to chat with NASA civil engineer Sam Ortega, Program Manager of Centennial Challenge. Ortega will answer questions about building and testing solid fuel rocket motors and being a civil engineer at NASA during a live video webchat tomorrow, Tuesday April 19, 2011 at 2 p.m. EDT.
The MESSENGER mission to Mercury uses infrared light to study properties of the planet. However, too much infrared radiation is detrimental to the spacecraft and its instruments.
As we look forward to the final launch of Endeavour, George Hatcher joins us to explain what it’s like to sit at the console in the launch control center during countdown. Learn about the tremendous amount of teamwork required between the Flight Control, Guidance and Navigation engineers and the entire team in the firing room to ensure a safe launch.
NASA Explorer Schools, in cooperation with Oklahoma State University, is pleased to announce the opportunity for registered NES educators to earn Continuing Education Units for participation in live NES electronic professional development sessions! Educators who fully participate in seven live e-PDs and complete the evaluation survey on the Virtual Campus for each live e-PD will earn one CEU. Those completing fourteen live e-PDs and surveys will earn two CEUs.
Small samples of representative lunar rocks and soils, embedded in rugged acrylic disks suitable for classroom use, are available for short-term loan to qualified school teachers. Each teacher must become a certified user of the disks through a brief training program prior to receiving a disk. Educational sample disks are distributed on a regional basis from NASA field centers located across the United States. For further details, use the contact information below.
In this episode of NASA Now, you’ll meet aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, who is helping NASA solve this complex problem. Learn why there is no perfectly designed system and all technological solutions have trade-offs, such as safety, cost or efficiency. Learn about the types of conflicts aircraft encounter and how engineers use trade-offs to come up with the best overall solution.