April 28, 2003

Middle school students participating in NASA's International Space Station (ISS) EarthKAM education program will help scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center study Earth's changing surface by taking pictures from the ISS April 29-May 2. ISS EarthKAM is an educational program in which students control, via Internet connections, a high-resolution digital camera operating on the International Space Station's Destiny science module.

This unique partnership benefits both middle school students as well as research scientists. Students profit by being involved in the process of real scientific research as well as through their interaction with scientists as they collaborate on the analysis of the research images. Students gain significant first-hand knowledge about the topics of research including global tectonics, faulting, volcanoes, river and lake systems, as well as land-use changes and humanity's impact on Earth's surface.

Nikki Woxberg's students at McNair Magnet School in Cocoa, Florida worked with Jacob Yates, a NASA geologist, during an ISS EarthKAM mission in early April. Woxberg pointed to the benefits of the ISS EarthKAM-Scientist partnership. "It gave meaning to what the students were studying. They worked especially hard to make sure that the image requests they sent up to the ISS were the very best possible." Woxberg continued, "Having direct involvement of scientists added significant excitement and seriousness to the whole learning process."

Scientist Yates indicated that, "This partnership provides immediate dividends to student education as well as science. Student experiences are enriched by our interactions while valuable image data, that otherwise might have been missed, is acquired by the students." He added that, "We view this as an opportunity to help encourage the next generation of NASA scientists."

ISS EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School students) was created by Dr. Sally Ride, America's first woman astronaut, in 1994. Over 8,500 high-quality digital pictures of Earth have since been taken by middle-school students. All are publicly available on the Web. During the early April ISS EarthKAM operating period, 71 schools representing 23 states and four countries took 696 pictures of Earth.

Two schools, experienced with ISS EarthKAM operations, will participate in the ISS EarthKAM student-scientist partnership during the April 29-May 2 operating period. It is expected that this pilot project will expand with successive ISS EarthKAM missions.

An additional ISS EarthKAM picture-taking mission is scheduled for November of 2003. Four additional operating periods are scheduled for 2004.

Schools interested in participating in this free educational program should contact ISS EarthKAM at http://www.earthkam.ucsd.edu.

For more information about NASA's Office of Education visit:

http://education.nasa.gov

For more information about the TERC Center for Earth and Space Science Education visit:
http://www.terc.edu/

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