NASA Explorer Schools educator Jeffrey Kaloostian and students from T.R. Robinson High School completed an exciting lesson, “Satellites, Orbits and STK.” (STK stands for Satellite Tool Kit.) Students working in pairs selected and researched an operating NASA satellite, then built a “junk” replica from paper towel tubes, string, balsa wood and other items. The student teams produced a computer presentation about the mission and developed an animation showing the satellite’s orbit with classical orbital elements.
Get a copy of Kaloostian’s lesson, in NEON.
Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.
NASA Explorer Schools educator Barbara Dire from Forest Heights Elementary School led her school through another successful NASA Family Science Night. Forest Heights starts each school year with this event to introduce new families to NASA and rekindle the NASA spark. This year they had a Digital Learning Network session with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory located in Pasadena, Calif. The event stressed to the families that NASA still has a mission. Most of the parents thought the last shuttle mission meant the end of NASA. After the DLN session, students had a lot of fun constructing rockets. There were 212 students, parents and teachers present at this very successful NASA Family Science Night.
Vin Urbanowski, NASA Explorer Schools educator from the Academy of Information Technology & Engineering in Stamford, Conn., created a lesson, The Engineer Who Became an Artist: A 
After attending the NASA Explorer Schools Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope Summer Experience, educators Kaci Hines, Cheryl May, Nancy Guillory and Donna Rand created a lesson that allows their students to control the GAVRT telescope from their classroom. Their lesson challenges students to determine the temperature of Jupiter by using the telescope. Three major tasks are involved in manipulating the telescope and acquiring accurate data: calibrating, scanning and recording data. Their lesson divides students into three separate groups to let each group learn the different tasks required to operate the telescope.
People in many countries throughout the world use satellite images and data. It’s important to be able to determine the exact time a picture was taken or data collected. To meet this need, satellites use a time stamp standard for tagging images and data — Universal Time, referred to as UT; or Zulu Time, designated by the letter Z; or Greenwich Mean Time, abbreviated as GMT. All three designations refer to the same time. The recorded time is the time at the 0º line of longitude, which runs through Greenwich, England.
Here is a great student activity for the springtime — have your students construct and launch a soda bottle rocket. This fun but highly educational activity demonstrates Newton’s Laws of Motion. Find out about other ways you can challenge your students by doing some of the other extensions to the Lunar Nautics module.
Patricia Smeyers, a teacher from Secaucus Board of Education, has a great idea for a Lunar Rover Project. Students design a new lunar rover for the future. They create their designs using cloud-based 3-D modeling software and present their engineered 3-D model and research.
Barrett’s NASA Save the Earth team won first prize in the Spaced Out Sports Challenge Contest! NASA contacted staff members Allyson Greene, Wendy Cohen, Laurie Sullivan, and Terry Bratt with the good news. Out of 57 entries nationwide, Barrett Elementary took first place in the contest. This accomplishment was the result of a huge team effort by all of the fifth-grade teachers, along with Renee Shaw’s wonderful filming and editing talents. The students worked very hard to design a fun, yet challenging sports-based game for astronauts on the International Space Station to play on an upcoming mission.