Filed under: Blogroll, K-12, Oregon State University, STEM, Science | Tags: 4-H, Blogroll, Summer Camp
The Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp was a huge success this year, enabling 60 middle school students the opportunity to attend this summer science camp free of charge! The scholarships were funded by an $80,000 grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation and the Harris Foundation. The camp was a collaboration between a number of OSU groups including the OSU Extension Service 4-H Youth Development program, OSU Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences (SMILE) program, the science and math departments, and the College of Education.
Find out more about the activites of these young scientists at the Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp blog. The blog includes photo and video from the camp.
Filed under: Funding, Higher Education, Scholarship, Science, Student Opportunities | Tags: Earth System Science
The Minorities Striving and Pursuing Higher Degrees of Success in Earth System Science, or MS PHD’S, initiative was developed by and for underrepresented minorities to facilitate increased participation in Earth system science. Each year, the initiative engages 30 minority undergraduate and graduate students in a series of activities.
The project starts with orientation and a broad Earth system science and engineering exposure during MS PHD’S community-building activities at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, Dec. 10-14, 2007, in San Francisco.
Participants will engage in additional professional development activities at one of the MS PHD’S organizational partners’ meetings. These activities could include attending meetings of the American Meteorological Society, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, the National Association of Black Geologists and Geophysicists, and the Oceanography Society, among others. Each participant will attend the meeting that most closely aligns with his or her specific academic and professional interests.
The final phase will occur at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., where participants will visit government agencies and engage in dialogs with professional society and foundation representatives. Each student will also receive a scholarship award of up to $1,000 and participate in a tour of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The deadline for submitting the online application is Sept. 10, 2007. For more information about the MS PHD’S initiative and how to apply, visit:
From our friends at the OMSI Planetarium:
The peak of the Aurigid Meteor Shower is forecast for Saturday, September 1 around 4:30 am PDT. The calculations indicate Earth is about to cross the dust trail of comet Kiess, a comet that takes some 2000 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. The trail is very narrow, so Earth will be sprayed by meteoroids for only about an hour and a half. The meteoroids will approach from the direction of the constellation Auriga, the charioteer, in the north-eastern part of the sky, causing a meteor shower called the “Aurigids.”
The shower is visible from only part of the world and the Pacific NW has the best viewing opportunity. Plan to step out around 4 A.M. PDT in the early Saturday morning of September 1, with the waning gibbous Moon behind an obstruction, and with a wide view on the sky. Gaze up at the sky and spot one of these elusive bits of matter that Comet Kiess lost 2000 years ago. Astronomers are predicting anywhere from 100 to 1,000 meteors an hour during the peak on Saturday morning. The weather forecast has mostly cloudy for Portland area, while mostly clear for eastern Oregon.
This is our only chance to see this shower; the dust trail is not going to hit again in our lifetime. No one can say for sure but it’s worth losing a little sleep to find out.
FULL STORY at:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/08aug_aurigids.htm?list12656
Filed under: NASA, Science | Tags: Space Shuttle Launch, Star Wars, STS-120
From a story by Robert Pearlman writing for Space.com:
When the space shuttle Discovery launches the STS-120 astronaut crew in October, the force will be with them.
Stowed on-board the orbiter, in addition to a new module for the International Space Station, will be the original prop lightsaber used by actor Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the 1977 film “Star Wars”. The laser-like Jedi weapon is being flown to the orbiting outpost and back in honor of the 30th anniversary of director George Lucas’ franchise.
Before it can make its trip to orbit though, the lightsaber will first fly to Houston, Texas, home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, by way of Southwest Airlines and a Star Wars-studded send off from Oakland International Airport in California on Tuesday.
Chewbacca, the towering Wookiee best known from the film as Han Solo’s co-pilot on the Millennium Falcon, will officially hand the lightsaber over to officials from Space Center Houston during a ceremony at the airport. Joining “Chewie” will be other characters from the six-part sci-fi classic, including Boba and Jango Fett and together they help push back the airplane on the tarmac.
Once on the ground in Houston, the flight will be greeted by a troop of Stormtroopers and other Star Wars notables including the droid R2-D2, who will deliver the lightsaber to a waiting line of Hummers outside the baggage claim of the William P. Hobby Airport. Accompanied by a police escort, the soon-to-be real space artifact will be driven to Space Center Houston to be exhibited inside a vault that currently displays moon rocks.
Space Center Houston, as the official visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, plans to publicly display the lightsaber through Labor Day, after which it will be prepared for its launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The lightsaber is scheduled to depart California at 10:40 a.m. PDT and arrive in Texas at 4:20 p.m. CDT according to a release jointly issued Monday by Southwest Airlines, Space Center Houston and Lucasfilm.
STS-120, targeted for launch on October 23, will be led by commander Pam Melroy and pilot George Zamka. The seven-person crew is completed by mission specialists Scott Parazynski, Doug Wheelock, Stephanie Wilson and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli, as well as space station Expedition 16 flight engineer Dan Tani. Besides the lightsaber, their primary cargo is the station’s second Italian-built U.S. multi-port node named Harmony.
Original Story here:
http://www.space.com/entertainment/cs_070828_sts120_lightsaber.html
Filed under: Competitions, NASA, Science | Tags: Centennial Challenge, Space Elevator, Spaceward Foundation
NASA Press Release – Washington, 8-28-07
From Oct. 19 to 21, more than 20 teams from across the nation and around the world will compete for a total of $1,000,000 from NASA for the development of cutting-edge technologies. The Beam Power Challenge and Tether Challenge, two of NASA’s seven Centennial Challenges, will take place at the 2007 Space Elevator Games at the Davis County Event Center in Salt Lake City.
“The innovations from these competitions will help support advances in aerospace materials and structures, new approaches to robotic and human planetary surface operations, and even futuristic concepts,” said Ken Davidian, program manager for NASA’s Centennial Challenges, Headquarters, Washington.
The Spaceward Foundation is conducting the challenges as part of the Space Elevator Games at no cost to NASA.
The Beam Power Challenge promotes the development of new power distribution technologies that can be applied to space exploration. This competition requires teams to design and build a climber machine that can travel up and down a ribbon while carrying a payload. Power will be beamed from a transmitter to a receiver on the climber. Each climber must scale a height of approximately 330 feet traveling at a minimum speed of 2 meters per second. As many as three teams with the highest qualifying scores could win the competition and share the $500,000 purse. Technologies demonstrated in this competition could have applications for future planetary surface operation with robots or humans.
The purpose of the Tether Challenge is to develop very strong, lightweight material. Super-strong tethers could enable advances in aerospace capability, including rocket weight reduction, habitable space structures, solar sails, or tether-based propulsion systems. The challenge will be conducted in two rounds that test the strength of each team’s tether. As many as three teams could share the $500,000 prize. The winners must demonstrate a technology at least 50 percent stronger than a baseline, state-of-the-art tether that uses off-the-shelf materials.
The space elevator is an Earth-to-space transportation system proposed in the 1960s and enhanced in 2000 by Dr. Bradley Edwards of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The system is comprised of a stationary cable moving in unison with the Earth, with one end anchored to the surface of the planet and the other in space. Electric cars then would travel up and down the cable, carrying cargo and people.
For more information about the competitions, visit:
http://www.spaceward.org
Centennial Challenges, an element of NASA’s Innovative Partnerships Program, promotes technical innovation through prize competitions to make revolutionary advances to support NASA’s mission, including the return to the moon and journey to Mars.
For more information about the Innovative Partnerships Program and Centennial Challenges, visit:
http://www.ipp.nasa.gov/cc
From our friends at OMSI:
On the morning of Tuesday, August 28, the Full Moon will slide through the dark shadow of our planet. For 91 minutes, the only light hitting the Moon will be the reddish glow from all of Earth’s sunrises and sunsets – technically we have a Total Lunar Eclipse! It is a deeper event since it is the first central total eclipse since 2000. Fortunately, the West Coast of Canada and the United States and in Alaska, the entire eclipse will be visible from start to finish before moonset in the early morning hours of Tuesday.
We’re calling it the eclipse of the Sturgeon Moon which is the name many American Indian fishing tribes gave the August full Moon since sturgeon were easily caught during August. The eclipse really gets underway at 1:51 a.m. PDT when the umbral shadow takes a small, dark bite out of the left edge of the Moon. For the 1 hour and 1 minute of partial eclipse, the darkness engulfs more of the Moon’s disk as it slides into the shadow. The partial eclipse ends and totality begins at 2:52 a.m. PDT, when the Moon slides completely within the umbra. The total phase lasts 91 minutes, with mideclipse (when the Moon looks darkest) occurring at 3:37 a.m. PDT. Because no one can predict what color the Moon will turn during totality that’s what makes it so much fun. Will it be bright orange, or blood red? Only the shadow knows. The total eclipse will end at 4:22 a.m. with the moon at 19 degrees above the SW horizon. Then at 5:23 a.m., the moon will exit the earth’s umbral shadow before setting below the western horizon at 6:40 a.m.
Times of Eclipse Events, August 28, 2007 (all times PDT)
Partial eclipse begins ………….1:51 a.m
Total eclipse begins …………..2:52 a.m
Mideclipse ………………………3:37 a.m
Total eclipse ends …………….4:22 a.m
Partial eclipse ends ……………5:23 a.m
Sunrise ………………………….6:26 a.m
Moon set ……………………….6:40 a.m
The moon is always full at the time of a lunar eclipse because earth will lie between the sun and moon. If the moon’s true path were exactly in the plane of earth’s orbit about the sun, we would have a lunar eclipse at each full moon. Actually, the moon’s path is inclined at about 5 degrees to the earth’s orbit, so every year of two on average all three line up for a lunar eclipse. In a lunar eclipse, the earth casts a dark central shadow, called the umbra, across the moon’s surface. The moon should look deep brown, gray or even reddish along the edge. The last major total lunar eclipse in the Pacific Northwest was back on November 29, 1993, January 20. 2000 and October 27, 2004.
NASA Links:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watchtheskies/eclipse.html
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/eclipse.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/03aug_dreamyeclipse.htm?list12656
The National Space Biomedical Research Institute’s Graduate Education Program in Space Life Sciences at Texas A&M University is currently accepting applications. The program enables students working toward a Ph.D. to focus on space life sciences and experience advanced courses in biomedical science and engineering, specifically as these fields relate to the space initiative.
The Texas A&M program will train scientists to perform the work necessary to solve three of the most critical problems that limit long-duration spaceflight: bone loss, muscle wasting and effects of cosmic radiation. Graduates will gain an integrated global perspective on these major biological problems of long-duration spaceflight and will be specifically trained in nutritional and exercise physiology countermeasures against those problems.
For more information about the Graduate Education Program in Space Life Sciences and the Texas A&M opportunity, visit
http://www.nsbri.org/GraduateEd
Now that the STS-118 mission has been extended three additional days, Endeavour’s crewmembers, including mission specialist and Educator Astronaut Barbara Morgan, are scheduled to have two more space-to-ground conversations with audiences at two locations in the U.S.
The next event will involve the headquarters of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in Virginia. The downlink is tentatively scheduled to occur on Aug. 16, 2007, at 8:06 a.m. EDT. CCSSE is a not-for-profit educational organization founded by the families of the astronauts who died during the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. The family members and CCSSE have developed a network of 49 Challenger Learning Centers across the nation, through which 400,000 students and 25,000 teacher experience simulated space missions each year.
The second event will be held with the Robert L. Ford School in Lynn, Mass. The downlink is tentatively scheduled to occur on Aug. 19, 2007, at 7:56 a.m. EDT. The Ford School is a member of the NASA Explorer Schools project, and is a full-service community school that offers a variety of services to help support families and students. With an approach it describes as “a neighborhood village with the school at the center,” the Ford School constantly re-evaluates how it can best serve its population of students.
Both events will be broadcast live on NASA TV and webcast online. (Exact dates and times of the downlinks are based on mission events and, therefore, are subject to change. Please check the NASA TV schedule for current information.)
For more information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Filed under: NASA, Podcasts, Science, Student Opportunities | Tags: Educator Astronaut, NOAA
This week’s NASA Student Opportunities Podcast goes underwater to interview Educator Astronaut Ricky Arnold. On Aug. 6, 2007, Arnold and the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, 13 crew began a 10-day undersea mission aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aquarius Underwater Laboratory.
The crew is testing lunar exploration concepts and long-duration spaceflight medical objectives. The mission comes at an exciting time — while Arnold is on Aquarius, mission specialist Barbara Morgan is making the first spaceflight of an Educator Astronaut on the STS-118 shuttle mission. Both missions carry with them plant growth chambers used for research related to NASA’s Engineering Design Challenge.
To hear Arnold discuss lunar exploration, NASA’s Engineering Design Challenge: Lunar Plant Growth Chamber and student involvement with the space agency, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nso
The crew of the STS-118 space shuttle mission, including Educator Astronaut Barbara Morgan, will have a space-to-ground conversation with an audience at the Discovery Center of Idaho. The downlink is scheduled to occur on Aug. 14, 2007, at 12:56 p.m. Mountain time.
The Discovery Center of Idaho is an interactive, hands-on science museum. Located in Boise, the Discovery Center hosts more than 100,000 visitors a year. With more than 160 interactive exhibits, and one-third of the museum dedicated to traveling exhibits, there is always something new and exciting to keep families coming back. The Outreach and Education programs at the Discovery Center reach more than 30,000 students each year in every corner of the geographically diverse state of Idaho. On any given day, and especially during the summer, the Discovery Center hosts camps, classes, clubs and other activities. Discovery Center is also a supporter of By Kids For Kids and other creativity-enhancing programs and organizations, both nationally and local to Idaho.
The downlink event will be broadcast live on NASA TV and webcast online. For more information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
