Off Planet Field Trips
Students are no longer limited to field trips on mother Earth...
Links
NASA Quest allows students to meet the people of NASA and look over their shoulders as they make NASA's goals a reality. With everything from aerospace design or training for space walks, NASA Quest provides a rich resource for teachers and students who are interested in meeting and learning about NASA people and the national space program.
NASA Quest includes a program called Women of NASA, profiling many of the women who work at NASA. Complete with Teaching Tips!
At the Space Telescope Science Institute site is scores of satellite images, such as the revived Hubble mission data, and other surprises, such as Amazing Space, a comet simulation in deep space.
The UK's Science Museum has interesting multimedia presentations on the Space Race and the Europa Space Mission.
Mars Exploration, sponsored by NASA, has seemingly everything we know about Mars, with sections for Kids, Students, and Educators. Everything from interactive games for the younger set to the Mars Exploration Student Data Team, where teachers and students work from their schools to help study and characterize different aspects of Mars -- from the atmosphere to the surface -- to help support the landed Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Designing a manned mission to Mars is obviously an extremely complex task, and one that requires knowledge on various disciplines. The Mars Academy project, intended for high school students and the general public, allows you to approximate and integrate solutions to all the design problems into a Mars mission. After a complete plan for the journey is put together, a web based simulation of the mission based on the adopted solutions is run.
Explore Mars Now is a much simpler simulation that allows students to explore a hypothetical Mars Base Habitat and Rover, and learn about the underlying science and technology, as well as hostile physical environment of Mars itself.
Why limit exploration to Mars? At NASA's Cassini-Huygens looks at our unmanned expedition to Saturn! Includes lesson plans for all grades from K thru 12! Stardust looks at NASA's successful mission to collect a sample of a comet and new assignments for the spacecraft.
And, in case extra-terrestrial life is encountered The SETI Institute--a seriously scientific site--has prepared a set of protocols which will help your students respond. They have been widely adopted by research labs all around the world. Students can participate in the search thru SETI@home, the long running scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) by analyzing radio telescope data.
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NASA has joined other agencies in developing high quality curriculum and learning opportunities.
It is amazing how many millions of classrooms all around the world have linked to the NASA projects. During news reports of the launch of Discovery's mission with John Glenn many folks showed very little knowledge of the value of NASA. NASA's education sites are too thrilling to keep to yourself--share!
