Author: John Entwistle

NASA Optimus Prime Spinoff Award Contest Open

Optimus Prime
Did you know that space technology is all around you? For example, the heart defibrillator and purified water are technologies developed by NASA engineers, scientists and innovators. NASA is required to share its technologies with the public. The public then can take these technologies and make them into something that you can use around your house, at school or even on the road. These are known as spinoffs.

NASA is collaborating with Hasbro using the correlation between the popular Transformers brand and spinoffs from NASA technologies. The OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award promotes NASA spinoffs, recognizes innovation through technology transfer and promotes innovative communication of spinoff stories to the public through video. The OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award serves to acknowledge the contribution of both NASA innovators and the companies that spun-off NASA technology for commercial applications, as well as to educate America’s youth about the benefits of NASA spinoff technology.

This is a video contest for students from third to eighth grade. Each student, or group of students, will submit a three- to five-minute video on a selected NASA spinoff technology listed in the 2009 Spinoff publication. Videos must demonstrate an understanding of the NASA spinoff technology and the associated NASA mission, as well as the commercial application and public benefit associated with the “transformed” technology. Video entries are due by December 31.

For more information about NASA Spinoffs check out the Spinoff Spotlight.

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus website. 

Forest Lake Elementary Technology Magnet School featured on NBC Nightly News


Forest Lake Elementary Technology Magnet School (Columbia, South Carolina), a NASA Explorer Schools project participant since 2006, was featured on the “NBC Nightly News” on Oct. 1 as part of a week-long series on trends and innovation in education. The team at Forest Lake has won numerous accolades for turning the school’s performance around by using innovative teaching methods. The staff credits the NES project as one of their main catalysts.

View the video clip.

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus website.

NASA Endeavor Science Teaching Certificate Project: K-12 Educator Fellowships


As part of NASA’s commitment to the effective preparation of science teachers, educators are invited to apply to become a NASA Endeavor Fellow. Each fellow is fully funded to complete five graduate courses in an innovative, online format. In these courses, participants learn to apply research-based pedagogical strategies and cutting-edge STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) content to their classroom. Applications for Cohort 3 will be accepted through Oct. 15, 2010.



Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus website.

NASA Now: Robonaut 2


NASA and partner General Motors are preparing to launch the first humanlike robot into space. Scheduled for launch aboard STS-133 in early November 2010, Robonaut 2 is a dexterous humanoid robot built and designed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The 300-pound Robonaut 2, nicknamed R2, will be the first permanent resident of the International Space Station.

This NASA Now event, available on the NES Virtual campus beginning Oct. 6, 2010, features Josh Mehling, Lead Mechanical Engineer on the Robonaut 2 project at NASA Johnson Space Center. Mehling presents information about the challenges of engineering, designing and building Robonaut 2 and provides the latest information about the robot’s assigned tasks onboard the International Space Station.

For more information about Robonaut 2, visit http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp.

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus home page.


NASA Education Blog, Taking Up Space, Is Going to the International Space Station

NASA Educational Technology Services announces a new blog for high school and college students called  “Taking Up Space.” The purpose of the blog is to tell stories and happenings with engineers, scientists, astronauts and many others who work at NASA. Sometimes the stories will just be about cool things going on at NASA and how to get involved with what’s going on. 
 
An exciting blog entry, posted on Sept. 29, 2010, describes an upcoming event occurring during space shuttle mission STS-133 early in November. NASA writer Heather Smith will talk with an astronaut via an International Space Station educational downlink and is inviting students to visit her “Taking Up Space” social media sites to help her decide which questions to ask. Visit the following sites for more information and to vote for favorite topics and questions.
 
Social media sites and promotions:

The deadline for participating is Tuesday, Oct. 12.




Celebrate World Space Week — Oct. 4-10, 2010


This international event commemorates the beginning of the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4, 1957. World Space Week is the largest public space event in the world, with celebrations in more than 50 nations. Last year, President Obama joined the celebration by hosting a Star Party at the White House that included invitations to students from NASA Explorer Schools in the Washington, D.C. area.


Join educators and space enthusiasts around the world to celebrate World Space Week, Oct. 4-10, 2010. During World Space Week, teachers are encouraged to use space-themed activities.

To learn more about World Space Week, to find related educational materials and to search for events in your area, visit http://www.worldspaceweek.org/.

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus home page.


DIME and WING Student Competitions

Downward view in a NASA drop tower.Dropping In a Microgravity Environment, or DIME, is a competition for high school student teams. WING — “What If No Gravity?” — is the competition for student teams in sixth through ninth grades. Both competitions challenge student teams from the U.S. and U.S. territories to develop and prepare a microgravity experiment. Each team must have an adult supervisor.

Proposals are due Nov. 1, 2010.

Winning teams will design and build the experiments that will be conducted in the 79-foot drop tower at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. When the experiment is dropped, it experiences weightlessness, or microgravity, for 2.2 seconds.

The top four DIME teams will receive an all-expenses-paid trip in March to conduct their experiments, review the results with NASA personnel and tour Glenn’s facilities. All DIME participants visiting NASA must be U.S. citizens.

Four additional DIME teams and up to 30 WING teams will be selected to build their experiments and ship them to Glenn to be drop-tested by NASA. These experiments and the resulting data will be returned to the teams so they can prepare reports about their findings.

For more information about entering NASA’s DIME and WING student team
competitions, visit http://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/DIME.html

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus home page.


NASA Now: Flight Testing

NASA Now logo
As in the early days of the manned space program, much of NASA’s flight testing still is conducted in the high desert of California, at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center located at Edwards Air Force Base. The desert’s wide open spaces, good weather and long, flat runway at Dryden make it NASA’s premier location for conducting atmospheric flight research and operations, as well as a backup landing spot for the space shuttle.

This NASA Now event, available on the NES Virtual campus beginning Sept. 29, 2010, features Albion Bowers, project manager of the Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project at Dryden. Bowers presents the latest information about some of NASA’s current flight test projects. 

For more information about current NASA flight research projects, visit https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/index.html.

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus home page.

ISS EarthKAM Fall 2010 Mission

Middle school educators are invited to join NASA for the International Space Station EarthKAM Fall 2010 Mission from Oct. 12-15, 2010. Find out more about this exciting opportunity that allows students to take pictures of Earth from a digital camera aboard the International Space Station.
 
ISS EarthKAM is a NASA-sponsored project that provides stunning, high-quality photographs of Earth taken from the space shuttle and the space station. Since 1996, ISS EarthKAM students have taken thousands of photographs of Earth by using the World Wide Web to direct a digital camera on select spaceflights and, currently, on the International Space Station.
 
For more information about the project and to register for the upcoming mission, visit the ISS EarthKAM home page www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu
 
If you have questions about the EarthKAM project, e-mail ek-help@earthkam.ucsd.edu. 

Link to the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus home page.


NASA Now: Lunar SLOPE

The NASA Now program series highlights a current NASA mission,area of research, or career within the agency.


In this, our first program of the 2010-2011 school year, introduce your science or technology classes toone of the many complex problems associated with living and working on the moonor another planetary body. In this NASA Now episode, students get a glimpse at theresearch conducted at NASA’s Lunar SLOPE facility, where scientists andengineers design, build and test wheels for the next generation rover vehicle. Studentssee how the SLOPE scientists and engineers test their prototype wheels on anartificial lunar surface developed especially for this project. Students will geta feel for how the unique properties of the lunar soil shape the design of thewheels.


The event is available atthe NES Virtual Campus’s NASA Now page beginning Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2010.


Visit the NASA Explorer Schools home page and click on NASA Now!

Related competitions: 

     Earth Science Week 2010 Photography Contest — Open to All Ages. Deadline for submissions is Oct. 15. 2010.
     Microgravity Competition — High School. Deadline for proposals is Nov 1. 2010.