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By NASA
4 min read
NASA Science for Your Classroom: Opportunities for Educators
The summer season for educators can be a time of rest and rejuvenation, but it can also offer opportunities for professional learning with new colleagues beyond your own school. The following programs from NASA’s Science Activation Program offer end-of-summer/early-fall curricular resources and connections with other educators that can help you bring new science ideas and activities into your instructional practice.
Celebrating the Moon & Moon Rocks with NASA – A Webinar for Educators
Join us, as the world awaits this year’s International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN on September 14, 2024), for this free NASA Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) interactive webinar focusing on the Moon, Moon rocks, Apollo and future Artemis Missions! This session will be geared towards educators and their students (targeting grades 5-9 but other grade levels, college students, and individual educators are welcome to participate). Participants will interact with Dr. Juliane Gross, Artemis Curation Lead at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. The presentation will last approximately 45 minutes followed by an optional 15-30 minutes of Q&A. If you can’t participate live, feel free to register to receive an archived recording of the presentation.
When: September 11 at 1:00 – 2:15 p.m. EDT Learn more and register Infusing Space Rock Content and More into Learning Environments
Join NASA Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science for an interactive webinar focusing on hands-on and digital Earth and Space Science resources appropriate for both formal and informal learning settings. This session, geared towards educators who work with grades 3 through HS or general audiences at public events, will prepare you to engage learners with content associated with Moon rocks, meteorites, samples from asteroids and more! Presentation will last approximately 50 minutes followed by an optional 10+ minutes of Q&A. Those who register below will receive an archived recording of the presentation.
When: September 17 at 8 p.m. EDT Register now Spark Curiosity with Infiniscope’s Free Resources!
Infiniscope is a NASA-funded project focused on sparking curiosity, fostering exploration, and delivering digital content and tools that transform the learning experience. NGSS-Designed digital learning experiences are just the beginning. Whether you want classroom-ready content or the tools and support to build your own, we’ve got you covered.
If you’re a middle school or highschool educator, join the webinars below and discover the incredible FREE resources waiting for you at Infiniscope.org. In this guided tour, you’ll learn how to: search for classroom-ready content on the website, find educator resources and detailed lesson information, enroll students in lessons and collections, sign up for future training events, access the virtual field trip creator, and get more information on our adaptive lesson builder. Learn more about Infiniscope.
Intro to Infiniscope Registration – September 17 at 4 p.m. EDT Intro to Infiniscope Registration – October 22 at 6 p.m. EDT Take Your Learners Anywhere with Tour It!
With Tour It, Infiniscope’s free virtual field trip creator, you can make place-based learning accessible to all your learners, boosting engagement and learning outcomes while enabling them to build personal connections. Tour It is your gateway to creating captivating virtual field trips! As a member of the Infiniscope teaching network, you’ll have exclusive access to this amazing tool that brings immersive learning experiences to life. Whether you’re a seasoned educator or just starting your journey, Tour It empowers you to craft engaging and interactive virtual tours that inspire learners and enable them to build personal connections to a place. Learn more about Tour it.
Exploring Place-Based Learning Registration – September 17 at 4 p.m. EDT Planning Your Virtual Field Trip Registration – October 22 at 6 p.m. EDT Heliophysics Webinars for Educators: Physics in an Astronomy Context
NASA’s Heliophysics Education Activation Team (HEAT) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) have put together a free, monthly, virtual workshop series for teachers of astrophysics taught in the context of introductory and upper division physics and astronomy courses. While these workshops are intended for secondary- and tertiary-level teachers who teach in formal classroom contexts, other educators are also welcome if the content covered is appropriate to your teaching context.
These virtual gatherings of 25-50 teachers occur one Saturday per month and provide an astrophysics mini-lecture, a small group engagement with the core activity, and discussion time to connect with like-minded educators.
Dates and Topics:
September, 21, 2024 – Coronal Mass Ejection Science October 12, 2024 – Planetary Magnetism Science November 9, 2024 – Auroral Currents December 7, 2024 – Star Spectra Science Time: 1 – 2:30 p.m. EDT
Register here
We hope these resources will help prepare you for a wonderful year of amazing science learning… and beyond!
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA is exploring potential partnerships for alternate use cases for the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) flight hardware, test facilities, and experienced personnel. Through a Request for Information for OSAM-1 Partnerships released Sept. 5, 2024, NASA seeks interest from U.S. organizations that will benefit commercial, civil, and national objectives, thereby advancing domestic leadership in In-space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) capabilities.
A comprehensive list of OSAM-1 resources and technologies organizations can consider using are outlined in the full Request for Information for OSAM-1 Partnerships available at www.sam.gov. Responses are due Sept. 30, 2024, by 11:59 p.m. EDT.
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Last Updated Sep 06, 2024 EditorLoura Hall Related Terms
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By NASA
5 Min Read ‘Current’ Events: NASA and USGS Find a New Way to Measure River Flows
The River Observing System (RiOS) tracking the motion of water surface features from above a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California in 2023. Credits: NASA/USGS/Joe Adams and Chris Gazoorian A team of scientists and engineers at NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collaborated to see if a small piloted drone, equipped with a specialized payload, could help create detailed maps of how fast water is flowing. Rivers supply fresh water to our communities and farms, provide homes for a variety of creatures, transport people and goods, and generate electricity. But river flows can also carry pollutants downstream or suddenly surge, posing dangers to people, wildlife, and property. As NASA continues its ongoing commitment to better understand our home planet, researchers are working to answer the question of how do we stay in-the-know about where and how quickly river flows change?
NASA and USGS scientists have teamed up to create an instrument package – about the size of a gallon of milk – called the River Observing System (RiOS). It features thermal and visible cameras for tracking the motion of water surface features, a laser to measure altitude, navigation sensors, an onboard computer, and a wireless communications system. In 2023, researchers took RiOS into the field for testing along a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California, and plan to return for a third and final field test in the fall of 2024.
The River Observing System (RiOS) tracking the motion of water surface features from above a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California in 2023. “Deploying RiOS above a river to evaluate the system’s performance in a real-world setting is incredibly important,” said Carl Legleiter, USGS principal investigator of the joint NASA-USGS StreamFlow project. “During these test flights we demonstrated that the onboard payload can be used to make calculations – do the analysis – in nearly real-time, while the drone is flying above the river. This was one of our top-tier goals: to enable minimal latency between the time we acquire images and when we have detailed information on current speeds and flow patterns within the river.”
To realize this vision for onboard computing, the team uses open-source software, combined with their own code, to produce maps of water surface velocities, or flow field, from a series of images taken over time.
“You might think that we need to be able to see discrete, physical objects – like sticks or silt or other debris as they move downstream – to estimate the flow velocity, but that’s not always the case, nor is it always possible,” said Legleiter. “Using a highly-sensitive infrared camera, we instead detect the movement of subtle differences in the temperature of water carried downstream.”
Those same tiny temperature differences also appear wherever there are undulations – like at the boundary between the air and the water or ice below. Knowing this, NASA members of the StreamFlow team used this phenomenon to their advantage when developing methods for possible future landed planetary missions to navigate at distant and hard-to-see environments, including Europa, the icy moon orbiting Jupiter.
Our technology can precisely track the static surface of icy terrain while flying over it, or a moving surface, like water, while hovering above it to keep the spacecraft safe while gathering valuable data
uland wong
Co-investigator and NASA lead of the StreamFlow Project
“Icy surfaces present challenging visual conditions such as lack of contrast,” said Uland Wong, co-investigator and NASA lead of the StreamFlow project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “Our technology can precisely track the static surface of icy terrain while flying over it, or a moving surface, like water, while hovering above it to keep the spacecraft safe while gathering valuable data.”
To prepare for the Sacramento River field tests, the NASA team built a robotics simulator to run thousands of virtual drone flights over the Sacramento River test site using flow fields modeled by USGS. These simulations are helping the team create intelligent software capable of selecting the best routes for the drone to fly and ensuring efficient use of limited battery power.
The next step in the partnership is for NASA to develop techniques for making the system more autonomous. The researchers want to use calculations of river flows – performed onboard in real time – to guide where the drone should fly next.
“Does the drone drop down to get better resolution data about a particular location or stay high and capture a wide-angle view,” posed Wong. “If it identifies areas that are flowing particularly fast or slow, could the drone more quickly detect areas of flooding?”
The USGS currently operates an extensive network of thousands of automated stream gauges and fixed cameras installed on bridges and riverbanks to monitor river flows in real-time across the country.
“Drones could enable us to make measurements in so many more areas, potentially allowing our network to be larger, more robust, and safer for our technicians to monitor and maintain,” said Paul Kinzel, StreamFlow co-investigator at USGS. “Drones could help keep our people and equipment out of harm’s way in addition to telling us how the environment is changing over time in as many locations as possible.”
A drone with the StreamFlow thermal mapping payload flying above the Sacramento River in Northern California.NASA/Massimo Vespignani For more information about how NASA improves life on Earth through climate and technological innovations, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/earth
The StreamFlow project is a collaboration between researchers with the USGS’s Hydrologic Remote Sensing Branch, Unmanned Aircraft Systems engineers with the USGS National Innovation Center, and scientists in the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames. The Streamflow payload concept was demonstrated through research initially seeded by a grant from the USGS National Innovation Center and is now supported by NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology program, which is managed by the agency’s Earth Science Technology Office. The field tests were conducted in collaboration with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center, which helped collect direct field measurements of the river’s flow velocity and granted access to the field site, which is owned by the Nature Conservancy.
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Last Updated Aug 05, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
4 Min Read How Do I Navigate NASA Learning Resources and Opportunities?
NASA offers a variety of platforms and resources to support kindergarten through college educators in bringing the excitement of exploration and discovery to students in the classroom and beyond. From in-depth lesson plans to supplemental videos and activities, the resources below can help educators develop an out-of-this world curriculum and create unforgettable experiences for their students.
Where Can I Find NASA STEM Learning Resources for My Classroom?
NASA’s website has a dedicated section for the agency’s learning resources: nasa.gov/learning-resources. Using the navigation bar, educators can click through to find dedicated pages with STEM resources for K-4, 5-8, and 9-12 grade bands.
Looking for something in particular for your curriculum? Try the NASA STEM Resource Search tool to explore hands-on activities, interactive features, videos, lesson plans, educator guides, and more. Browse the nearly 2,000 resources or search by grade level, subject, or keywords.
NASA also offers a range of resources and community-based projects that invite learners of all ages to participate in authentic science across the U.S. and the world through the Science Activation (SciAct) program. In addition to traditional classroom resources, NASA has a webpage dedicated to citizen science opportunities around the globe, which can be fun to participate in as a class.
How Do I Connect My Classroom With a NASA Expert?
NASA has several pathways for getting a NASA expert involved with your classroom.
Students can get questions answered by astronauts living and working aboard the International Space Station through In-Flight Education Downlinks. These twenty-minute live Q&A sessions are available to U.S.-based education organizations. Applications are accepted during several proposal periods each year.
Educators can also request classroom engagements with NASA engineers, scientists, and other professionals through the NASA Engages program. The program connects NASA experts with U.S. students ranging from preschool to college, through formal or informal education groups such as libraries, museums, professional and technical organizations, afterschool programs, and other non-profit organizations. Requests can be made in the NASA STEM Gateway platform after creating an account.
NASA STEM Gateway is also the portal where educators and students can sign up for other NASA opportunities, such as internships, student challenges, and more.
How Can I Obtain an Authentic Space Program Artifact for Use in My Classroom?
U.S. K-12 schools, universities, and other organizations may be eligible to request an authentic NASA artifact to help bring STEM lessons to life in the classroom. NASA considers an “artifact” to be an object representing historically significant or innovative achievements in spaceflight, aviation, technology, or science. Through NASA’s Artifact Module, browse through the agency’s trove of objects and request an item that will spark inspiration or understanding among students in the Artemis Generation.
How Can I Find Out About New NASA STEM Resources and Opportunities?
To learn about the latest NASA STEM resources and opportunities, follow NASA STEM on X, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube. NASA also publishes a weekly e-newsletter for teachers, parents, caregivers, and students. Sign up for the NASA EXPRESS newsletter to get the latest NASA STEM opportunities delivered to your inbox every Thursday. It’s an easy way to stay up to date on internships, challenges, professional development, and more.
NASA also has an online community of practice for formal and informal educators called CONNECTS (Connecting Our NASA Network of Educators for Collaborating Together in STEM). On the CONNECTS platform, new and experienced professionals in STEM education can join discussions, share best practices, learn about the latest events and opportunities at NASA, participate in professional development opportunities, and download free STEM products available by topic or grade level. Registered community members can chat with other members who are interested in similar fields and can find nearby members with whom they can collaborate.
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Ames Center Director Eugene Tu, left, and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, left, pose in front of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility hyperwall as it displays New Zealand and Earth’s ocean currents.NASA/ Brandon Torres Navarrete As one of eight nations that helped to develop the Artemis Accords, New Zealand is a valuable NASA partner. On July 12, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visited NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley to learn more about how Ames supports efforts to return humans to the Moon and the ongoing collaboration between NASA and New Zealand to observe and study Earth’s interconnected systems.
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Last Updated Jul 18, 2024 Related Terms
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