Tag: High School Students

Video Chat: Sea Level Rise and Global Climate Change

Josh WillisGive your students the opportunity to ask questions of a NASA oceanographer and climate scientist. Dr. Josh Willis is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He was the Deputy Project Scientist and a member of the science team on Jason 1 and 2. Willis is currently the Lead Project Scientist for the Jason 3 project.


To join the chat, go to the chat page up to 15 minutes prior to noon EST, where you will find instructions for logging into the chat room to ask questions.


Link to the chat page where you will find a list of resources to help you prepare your students for the chat: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/nes2/home/chat-sea-level.html



NASA Releases Sector 33 Air Traffic Control Educational App

Sector 33 iTunes logoNASA has released a new educational game with an air traffic control theme for Apple iPhone and iPad devices. Sector 33 is designed to challenge students in middle school and above to use basic math and problem-solving skills.


This is a great companion app for the popular Distance-Rate-Time: Smart Skies lesson, available on the NES Virtual Campus.

An Android version of the app is in development and will be made available in the Android Marketplace in the coming months.

Visit Sector 33 for more information or to download the application free of charge.

Winter Solstice 2011

The sun, nearing winter solstice, travels low across the sky in a multiple-exposure picture made in Maine in 2002.This year, the winter solstice takes place on Thursday, Dec. 22 at 12:30 a.m. EST. The winter solstice marks the day when winter officially starts in the Northern Hemisphere and when days start to become incrementally longer. Do you understand why this happens? Find out at the Chandra website and then incorporate the information into the NES lessons Heat Transfer: MESSENGER — My Angle on Cooling (grades 5-8), Analyzing Solar Energy Graphs: MY NASA DATA (grades 9-12), and Temperature and Earth Climate: Modeling Hot and Cold Planets (grades 7-9).

New NASA iPhone App: Tracking Meteoroids

Surprising but true: Every day, on average, more than 40 tons of meteoroids strike our planet. Most are tiny specks of comet dust that disintegrate harmlessly high up in Earth’s atmosphere, producing a slow drizzle of meteors in the night sky. Bigger chunks of asteroid and comet debris yield dozens of nightly fireballs around the globe. Some are large enough to pepper the ground with actual meteorites.


With so much “stuff” zeroing in on our planet, NASA could use some help keeping track of it all.

Enter the Meteor Counter–a new iPhone app designed to harness the power of citizen scientists to keep track of meteoroids.The app is available free of charge in Apple’s app store. Just click on the link in the previous sentence or search for Meteor Counter in the app store, and let the observing begin.

NASA Now — Exploring Asteroids: An Analog Mission

NASA Now program slateNASA Now — Exploring Asteroids: An Analog Mission is available on the NES Virtual Campus beginning Dec 14, 2011.


NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, project lead Bill Todd describes this analog mission and how aquanauts living and working in an undersea habitat are helping NASA prepare for future asteroid exploration. NASA Now Minutes are excerpts from a weekly current events program available for classroom use at the NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus. 

Preview the program below

REMINDER: Live Video Chat Today at Noon

Did you know there are approximately 19,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth that serve no useful purpose? And those are just the objects having a diameter of 10 centimeters (4 inches) or larger. The estimated population of objects between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is closer to 500,000! Now, think about launching new spacecraft or satellite into space without hitting any of these objects and you can appreciate the kind of work Danielle Margiotta does as an engineer for NASA. Join us at noon EST on Dec. 13, 2011, to ask Danielle questions about the ins and outs of contamination engineering, or how to help a spacecraft and satellites navigate and manage their inevitable encounters with space junk.


Submit questions during the chat through a chat window, or send them to NASA-Explorer-Schools@mail.nasa.gov.

Classroom Discussion: Buy a Live Christmas Tree or an Artificial One?

Know your trees: Images of a Douglas Fir, Eastern Red Cedar, Fraser Fir, Noble Fir, Norway Spruce, Scotch Pine, Virginia Pine and White SpruceGet a real tree this holiday season. Buy it or cut it yourself at a tree farm. Either way, you will be helping the environment.


Surprised? Most people think it’s bad to cut a live holiday tree. Instead, they buy an artificial tree made of plastic or other synthetic material. Because they reuse this artificial tree year after year, they think they are saving real trees. Farmers plant Christmas trees in rows just as if they were corn.

But not so. Farmers grow trees especially for the holidays. They plant huge tracts of land in beautiful noble pines, Douglas firs, blue spruce, and other favorites. It may take 8 to 12 years to grow a good sized tree. But during that time, the tree is taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. It is cleaning the air and helping global warming. If people didn’t buy the cut trees, the farmers wouldn’t plant them.

When you are done with your holiday tree, you can recycle it. Most cities have programs to pick up your holiday tree and grind it up into mulch. Then it is spread back onto the land to help grow something else-or more trees.

No matter how many years you reuse an artificial tree, someday it will get thrown away and end up in a landfill for the next 1000 years!

So, help save Earth. Chop down a tree!

Let us know what you or your students think by adding a comment to this post.


Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page.




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Team America Rocketry Challenge

Team America Rocketry Challenge logoRegistration is open for Team America Rocketry Challenge 2012, a national model rocket competition for U.S. students in grades 7-12. Thousands of students compete each year, making TARC the world’s largest model rocket contest. Cash prizes are awarded to the top finishers. Participation is limited to the first 1,000 teams who register by Nov. 30, 2011.

For more information and to register visit the competition website.



Giant-sized Webb Space Telescope Model to 'Land' in Baltimore

James Webb Space Telescope in GermanyBaltimore’s Maryland Science Center is going to be the “landing site” for the full-scale model of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and it’s free for all to see. 

The life-sized model of the Webb telescope is as big as a tennis court, and it’s coming to the Maryland Science Center at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from Oct. 14-26, 2011. It’s a chance for young and old to get a close-up look at the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope in the same size it will be launched into space.

On May 17, NASA Explorer Schools hosted a live interactive video webchat with Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather. Mather, Senior Project Scientist for James Webb Space Telescope, answered questions from students across the country. To watch a video archive of the chat, visit https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/national/nes2/home/Mather-chat.html.

To read more about this amazing opportunity to see a full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope, visit https://www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/features/webb-balto.html.