NES Teachers Attend WRATS

Launch of sounding rocketOn June 20-24, 2011, 20 educators participated in the Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students, or WRATS, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, located at Wallops Island, Virginia. Of the 20 participants, 10 were NASA Explorer Schools educators who have been recognized for their best practices in using the Rockets Educator Guide content module on the NES Virtual Campus. 

The educators toured Wallops Flight Facility, built rockets, launched them and analyzed the launch data. They also interacted with university students attending the NASA hosted RockOn! University Rocket Science Workshop and got an inside look at the students’ experiments. The highlight of the week was the launch of the Terrier-Improved Orion Sounding Rocket on June 23. 

Michelle Harrison
Michelle Harrison (shown in the picture to the right), NES participant from Holly Grove Christian School, commented on how the WRATS workshop gave her the confidence to use the Rockets Educator Guide content module in her classroom. 

To see more pictures from WRATS, check NES on facebook.

To use the Rockets Educator Guide with your students this fall, sign-up to be a participant in the NASA Explorer Schools project.

Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.



Because It Flew — Education Activities and Space Shuttle Art Competition

Because it flew logo“Because It Flew,” or BIF, is a free educational program that introduces students in grades 4-12 (ages 9-17) to the impact of the Space Shuttle Program on our planet and people. This engaging and informative project commemorates the 30-year history of the shuttle program. BIF consists of two elements: optional educational activities and the NASA Space Shuttle Art Competition. Entries in the competition are due Aug. 5, 2011. BIF is a joint education initiative of NASA, the National Institute of Aerospace and USA Today Education.


Submission deadline: August 5, 2011.

For more information, visit www.usatodayeducate.com/becauseitflew

If you have any questions about this contest, please e-mail Jan Brown.




Message From the NASA Administrator

What’s Next for NASA

In just a couple of hours, I am delivering an address at the National Press Club to talk about NASA’s future, and before I do so, I wanted to share with you what I’m going to be discussing. You can also watch the speech at 1:00 p.m. EDT on NASA TV or the Web, or if you are at Headquarters, in the James Webb Auditorium. 



 
Next week, NASA will launch its final Space Shuttle mission, turning the page on a remarkable period in America’s history in space, while beginning the next chapter in our nation’s extraordinary story of exploration.  From the early exploits of Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark and Robert Peary to the breakthrough journeys of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, Americans have always been a curious people — bold enough to imagine new worlds, ingenious enough to chart a course to them and courageous enough to go for it.  And the gifts of knowledge and innovation that we have brought back from the unknown have played their part in the building of our more perfect union.
 


Some say that our final shuttle mission will mark the end of America’s 50 years of dominance in human spaceflight.  As a former astronaut and the current NASA Administrator, I want to tell you that American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we have laid the foundation for success — and here at NASA failure is not an option.
 


President Obama has given us a Mission with a capital “M” — to focus again on the big picture of exploration and the crucial research and development that will be required for us to move beyond low Earth orbit.  He’s charged us with carrying out the inspiring missions that only NASA can do, which will take us farther than we’ve ever been — to orbit Mars and eventually land on it. He’s asked us to start planning a mission to an asteroid, and right now our Dawn spacecraft is approaching one of the biggest in the solar system, Vesta. What it finds out could help inform such a mission. 
 


The President is asking us to harness that American spirit of innovation, the drive to solve problems and create capabilities that is so embedded in our story and has led us to the Moon, to great observatories, and to humans living and working in space, possibly indefinitely. That American ingenuity is alive and well, and it will fire up our economy and help us create and win the future now.
 


So when I hear people say — or listen to media reports — that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human spaceflight, I have to say . . . these folks must be living on another planet.  We are not ending human spaceflight, we are recommitting ourselves to it and taking the necessary — and difficult — steps today to ensure America’s pre-eminence in human spaceflight for years to come.
 


I spent 14 years at NASA before leaving and then returning to head the agency. Some of the people I respect most in the world are my fellow astronauts. Some of my best friends died flying on the shuttle. I’m not about to let human spaceflight go away on my watch. And I’m not going to let it flounder because we pursued a path that we couldn’t sustain.
 


We have to get out of the business of owning and operating low Earth orbit transportation systems and hand that off to the private sector, with sufficient oversight to ensure the safety of our astronauts. American companies and their spacecraft should send our astronauts to the ISS, rather than continuing to outsource this work to foreign governments. That is what I am committed to and that is what we are going to do.
 


Along with supporting the ISS and commercial crew transportation, NASA will pursue two critical building blocks for our deep space exploration future — a deep space crew vehicle and an evolvable heavy-lift rocket.  As you know, we have made a decision to base the new multi-purpose crew vehicle, or MPCV — our deep space crew module — on the original work we’ve done on the Orion capsule.   We’re nearing a decision on the heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, and will announce that decision soon. 
 


Our destinations for humans beyond Earth remain ambitious. They include: the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. The debate is not if we will explore, but how we’ll do it.  The International Space Station is the centerpiece of our human spaceflight for the coming decade. Every research investigation and all of the systems that keep the ISS operational help us figure out how to explore farther from our planet and improve life here.
 


And we have a huge number of amazing science missions coming up. We’ll advance aeronautics research to create a safer, more environmentally friendly and efficient air travel network.
 


NASA is moving forward and making change because the status quo is no longer acceptable. President Obama has outlined an urgent national need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build our competitors and create new capabilities that will take us farther into the solar system and help us learn even more about our place in it. NASA is ready for this grand challenge.
 


As we go into this Independence Day holiday weekend, my thoughts are on what it means to be an American and this great responsibility we have to our country. For those of us in public service, it is a commitment to serve our country. Thank you for your work and your dedication;  we would not have this amazing, American space program if it were not for people like you. Have a wonderful and safe holiday and may God bless America!
 

Charlie B.

NASA Now: International Space Station Payloads

NASA Now logoIn this final NASA Now program of the 2011-2012 school year, Katie Presson of the Payload Operations Integration team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, discusses investigations being conducted on the ISS. She describes the detailed process of getting science investigations, or payloads, approved and ready for their journey to the ISS. Presson also discusses safety requirements and describes some unique experiments for education and how teachers and students can be involved.




Click on the video link below to watch a preview of this program.

Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.


NASA Now Minute


How High is it?

The position of a geosynchronous satellite at 12 hour intervalsNASA’s educator guide How High Is It? includes mathematics activities to explain scale size and scale distance. The guide helps put aside misconceptions about how far away spacecraft and satellites are. At 22,240 miles above Earth, spacecraft put into orbit over the equator travel at 7,000 miles per hour around the equator and follow Earth’s rotation.


To find out more about the activities in the educator guide How High Is It?, read the article in the Satellite Meteorology forum in NEON.

NASA Now: Dawn-Mission to the Asteroids

Dawn, a mission belonging to NASA’s Discovery Program, delves into the unknown, drives new technology innovations and achieves what has never been attempted before. Dawn is orbiting asteroid Vesta, then heading to asteroid Ceres to gather more data. Dawn’s goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations. Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Ceres and Vesta are two of the biggest asteroids in the solar system. Ceres is so big that it is classified as a dwarf planet, and Vesta is not far behind.
 
This mission will help NASA understand what the conditions were when Vesta and Ceres formed at the dawn of the solar system. Dawn will fit more pieces into the grand puzzle of how our solar system formed and evolved — and perhaps how others do as well.

Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.


NASA Now Minute: Dawn-Mission to the Asteroids



U.S. Postal Service Celebrates 50th Anniversary of First Manned Spaceflight With Commemorative Stamps

Commemorative StampsThe 50th anniversary of America’s first manned spaceflight is being commemorated with the issuance of two stamps. The stamps went on sale May 4, 2011.

One stamp salutes NASA’s Project Mercury, America’s first manned spaceflight program, and NASA astronaut Alan Shepard’s historic flight on May 5, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Freedom 7.

The other stamp draws attention to NASA’s unmanned MESSENGER mission, a scientific investigation of the planet Mercury. On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around Mercury.

These two historic missions frame a remarkable fifty-year period in which America has advanced space exploration through more than 1,500 manned and unmanned flights.

Donato Giancola of Brooklyn, N.Y., who based the stamps on NASA photos and images, designed both stamps.

The release of the MESSENGER stamp is related to the NASA Explorer Schools content module, MESSENGER: Cooling with Sunshades. To learn more about the MESSENGER stamp, go to the article in NEON.

To use the MESSENGER: Cooling With Sunshades lesson and activity in your classroom, log into the NES Virtual Campus and click on the Teaching Materials button in the left column. The activity is an engaging, hands-on lesson covering physics concepts including temperature, latent heat, state of matter and transfer of energy.

How High Is It?

Front cover of How High Is It educator guideNASA’s educator guide How High Is It? includes mathematics activities to explain scale size and scale distance. The guide helps put aside misconceptions about how far away spacecraft and satellites are. At 22,240 miles above Earth, spacecraft put into orbit over the equator travel at 7,000 miles per hour around the equator and follow Earth’s rotation.

To find out more about the activities in the How High Is It? educator guide, read the article in the Satellite Meteorology forum in NEON.


NASA Now: Total Lunar Eclipse

NASA Now logoA lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes behind Earth so that Earth blocks the sun’s rays from striking the moon. This can occur only when the sun, Earth and moon are aligned exactly, or very closely, with Earth in the middle. Hence, there is always a full moon the night of a lunar eclipse.
 

Unlike a solar eclipse, which can only be viewed in a relatively small area on Earth, a lunar eclipse can be seen by anyone on the night side of Earth. A lunar eclipse lasts for a few hours, whereas a total solar eclipse lasts for only a few minutes at any given place. Some lunar eclipses have been associated with important historical events.


In this NASA Now program, astronomer Steven Edberg from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., shines some light on the science behind lunar eclipses.

NASA Now Minute: Total Lunar Eclipse