Science Cheerleader

Calling all sophomores, juniors and seniors interested in space or robotics. You have until January 18th to apply to the NASA Academy. Check it out! (h/t Bart Leahy)

This ain’t yo’ daddy’s NASA no mo’.  Today, NASA launches Mission Science, a site designed specifically for teens “who have their own unique language and style,” according to this morning’s NASA press release. Teens can access real-time spacecraft data, conduct experiments with NASA scientists, find space-related summer internships, and participate in a host of social networking initiatives. And, yes, it’s also designed to showcase NASA’s vast “collection of educational resources and encourage students to study and pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.” Yes, yes, there are still shades of yo’ daddy’s NASA but this is a great start. True fact: NASA has accounts on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. NASA, you da bomb!

From the NASA press release:
Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.
The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.
“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.”

“So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls ’small pieces loosely joined,’ ” says Microsoft’s CTO of Advanced Government Technologies, Lewis Shepherd. (more…)

This is a NASA video of Sally Ride talking about being chosen as NASA’s first female astronaut, and what it was like to ride the shuttle into space. What an experience that must have been.

I had the honor of working closely with Sally Ride several years ago, first at Space.com, then when she hired me to create a middle school science competition for Imaginary Lines, Inc. (www.SallyRideScience.com), a company she founded to support the large numbers of girls and young women who are, or might become, interested in science, math, engineering and technology.

Thanks to support from founding sponsors Hasbro and Smith College, TOY Challenge was created in a few short months. (So happy to see it’s still going strong!)

TOY Challenge is based on the belief that “toys are a great way to learn about science, engineering, and the design process! As girls and boys create a toy or game, they experience engineering as a fun, creative, collaborative process, relevant to everyday life.”

Teams of middle school students work together to dream up and design new toys. Check out last year’s winners.

Registration for the 2010 Toy Challenge is open now through November 20.

Good luck! And, thanks Sally, for all you do for girls and science.

This video is clearly dated but it’s clever.  NASA SHOULD have produced this but they didn’t (the U.S. Space Foundation did). However, NASA’s moving in the right direction to become more connected with the people who fund the agency (us). Here’s Bart with a report on how NASA is keeping up with the times.

NASA is arguably the most popular and well-known agency in the U.S. federal government today. Studies by Dittmar Associates more or less confirm that the more the public knows about what the nation’s space agency does, the higher their opinion of it. However, one of the complaints I often hear is that “NASA doesn’t do enough to get out their message.”

While the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, is looser than many federal agencies’ charters generally preventing them from marketing themselves, NASA itself restricts itself to education and outreach. That is, they will inform the public about what they’re doing through conventional channels and through educational institutions, but they will not take actions or positions that might be unwelcome by the President, who sets policy, or the Congress, which pays the bills (well, with our money).

All this said, NASA continues to do some very cool things in the field of outreach, and they are getting better at using the internet as a communication tool. More importantly, the agency is finding ways to get the public involved what it is doing. Take, for example, the “My Exploration” site launched (so to speak) by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. (more…)

The Return of Buzz Lightyear

Thanks, John, for sharing this NASA image of the day. Disney’s space ranger Buzz Lightyear returned from space on Sept. 11, aboard space shuttle Discovery’s STS-128 mission after 15 months aboard the International Space Station. His time on the orbiting laboratory will celebrated in a ticker-tape parade together with his space station crewmates and former Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin on Oct. 2, at Walt Disney World in Florida.

While on the space station, Buzz supported NASA’s education outreach program– STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)–by creating a series of fun educational online outreach programs. Following his return, Disney is partnering with NASA to create a new online educational game and an online mission patch competition for school kids across America. NASA will fly the winning patch in space. In addition, NASA plans to announce on Oct. 2, 2009, the details of a new exciting educational competition that will give students the opportunity to design an experiment for the astronauts on the space station.

Image Credit: NASA

Thanks, Paul, for sharing your comment with us:

“Hi!  I thought you’d be interested in this story from Science@NASA: Amateur
astronomers have photographed NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft en route to an October crash landing on the Moon.  Observers say the spacecraft is surprisingly easy to photograph, and NASA hopes more amateurs will give it a try.”

So intuitive, so organic. We look to the stars as adults and as kids, like this little boy pictured here. The (renowned) artist, Wendell Minor, told me this is his favorite image included in the recently released book, “Look To The Stars,” by Buzz Aldrin (the second person to step foot on the moon, 40 years ago this month).

I’ll post a review shortly but in the interim here’s a lovely, frank review written by a young boy named Josh Chinn here in Philadelphia. Great job, Josh! (Josh: bet your “Space Quiditch for Muggles” game will be a hit some day!) His father adds, “He actually liked the book more than he implies in his review and for what it’s worth I really like this book…the art’s beautiful, too.”
Ok: Take it away, Josh. (more…)

Want to know when a space craft will be flying over your city?

Check out the schedule here. (Thanks for the tip, Bart!)