Posted on by Jason Major

How Small Are Atoms?

No fruits were harmed in the making of this video.

Here on Universe Today we often discuss things that exist on the atomic and sub-atmonic scale. Even though astronomy is concerned with very big things that happen over very, very large distances and time spans, the reality is that our Universe is driven by events occurring on the tiny atomic scale.

We all know atoms are really small (and the particles inside them are even smaller.) But… how small are they, really? To help answer that question, here’s a neat little animation from TEDEducation, presented by Jonathan Bergmann and Cognitive Media.

(That’s one big grapefruit!)

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Posted on by Jason Major

Texas School Kids Get To Talk To Space

Some lucky sixth-, seventh- and eigth-graders at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, Texas got the chance to chat with Expedition 30 astronauts Dan Burbank, Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers aboard the International Space Station today, getting answers to their questions about life in orbit. The video was shared by NASA TV shortly after. Enjoy!

Credit: NASA

Posted on by Ken Kremer

Student Alert: GRAIL Naming Contest – Essay Deadline November 11

NASA announces student Essay Naming Contest for the twin GRAIL Lunar spaceships. The essay writing contest is open to students in Grades K - 12 at schools in the United States. Submission Deadline is November 11, 2011. GRAIL A & B are twin science robots that will explore the gravity field of the moon like never before.

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Student Alert ! – Here’s your once in a lifetime chance to name Two NASA robots speeding at this moment to the Moon on a super science mission to map the lunar gravity field. They were successfully launched from the Earth to the Moon on September 10, 2011. Right now the robots are called GRAIL A and GRAIL B. But, they need real names that inspire. And they need those names real soon. The goal is to “capture the spirit and excitement of lunar exploration”, says NASA – the US Space Agency.

NASA needs your help and has just announced an essay writing contest open to students in Grades K – 12 at schools in the United States. The deadline to submit your essay is November 11, 2011. GRAIL stands for “Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory.”

The rules state you need to pick two names and explain your choices in 500 words or less in English. Your essay can be any length up to 500 words – even as short as a paragraph. But, DO NOT write more than 500 words or your entry will be automatically disqualified.

Learn more about the GRAIL Essay Naming Contest here:

Read all the Official Contest Rules here:

Download the Naming Contest Submission Form here:

Students: NASA Wants You to Name that GRAIL !
Write an Essay and name these twin Lunar mapping satellites. NASA’s twin GRAIL A & B science probes are now streaking to the Moon and arrive on New Year’s Day 2012. This picture shows how they looked, mounted side by side, during launch preparations prior to blasting off for the Moon on Sept. 10, 2011 from Florida. Credit: Ken Kremer

The GRAIL A and B lunar spaceships are twins – just like those other awe inspiring robots “Spirit” and “Opportunity” , which were named by a 10 year old girl student and quickly became famous worldwide and forever because of their exciting science missions of Exploration and Discovery.They arrive in Lunar Orbit on New Year’s Day 2012.

Blastoff of twin GRAIL A and B lunar gravity mapping spacecraft on a Delta II Heavy rocket on Sept. 10 from Pad 17B Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:08 a.m. EDT. Credit: Ken Kremer

And there is another way that students can get involved in NASA’s GRAIL mission.

GRAIL A & B are both equipped with four student-run MoonKAM cameras. Students can suggest targets for the cameras. Then the cameras will take close-up views of the lunar surface, taking tens of thousands of images and sending them back to Earth.

“Over 1100 middle schools have signed up to participate in the MoonKAM education and public outreach program to take images and engage in exploration,” said Prof. Maria Zuber of MIT.

Prof. Zuber is the top scientist on the mission and she was very excited to announce the GRAIL Essay Naming contest right after the twin spaceships blasted off to the Moon on Sep 10, 2011 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

What is the purpose of GRAIL ?

“GRAIL simply put, is a ‘Journey to the Center of the Moon’,” says Dr. Ed Weiler, NASA Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC.

“It will probe the interior of the moon and map its gravity field by 100 to 1000 times better than ever before. We will learn more about the interior of the moon with GRAIL than all previous lunar missions combined. Precisely knowing what the gravity fields are will be critical in helping to land future human and robotic spacecraft. The moon is not very uniform. So it’s a dicey thing to fly orbits around the moon.”

“There have been many missions that have gone to the moon, orbited the moon, landed on the moon, brought back samples of the moon,” said Zuber. “But the missing piece of the puzzle in trying to understand the moon is what the deep interior is like.”

So, what are you waiting for.

Start thinking and writing. Students – You can be space explorers too !

Read Ken’s continuing features about GRAIL
GRAIL Lunar Blastoff Gallery
GRAIL Twins Awesome Launch Videos – A Journey to the Center of the Moon
NASA launches Twin Lunar Probes to Unravel Moons Core
GRAIL Unveiled for Lunar Science Trek — Launch Reset to Sept. 10
Last Delta II Rocket to Launch Extraordinary Journey to the Center of the Moon on Sept. 8
NASAs Lunar Mapping Duo Encapsulated and Ready for Sept. 8 Liftoff
GRAIL Lunar Twins Mated to Delta Rocket at Launch Pad
GRAIL Twins ready for NASA Science Expedition to the Moon: Photo Gallery

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Back to School Inspiration: Be That Light

Are you an educator, heading back to another year of teaching and need a little inspiration? — or do you know a teacher that is back in the classroom after summer break? Then this awesome little video is for you. It’s the latest from “Symphony of Science” and it features our friend Dr. Jeff Goldstein and a speech he made at the National Science Teachers Association Conference this year, “Science – It’s Not a Book of Knowledge … It’s a Journey.” Dr. Jeff is a science educator and planetary scientist and is the Director of National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. He is passionate about teaching and is admittedly “emotional about science,” as we all should be.

Here’s why he helped make this video: “Right now, in this very moment, we wanted to poetically and passionately reaffirm to teachers why they went into teaching, and for the millions of teachers across America, recognize their selfless and noble dedication to lighting the way. This is a heartfelt thank you to teachers for their unwavering dedication to the next generation.”

If you need more inspiration, see Dr. Jeff’s Blog on the Universe

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Historic Opportunity for Students to Participate on “Extra” Shuttle Mission

Astronaut Jeffrey Williams doing plant cells vs. microgravity experiments aboard the ISS in December 2009. Credit: NASA

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A new opportunity for students to be part of history and fly an experiment on what could be the last space shuttle mission has been announced by the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) for the STS-135, the shuttle mission that might fly in June of 2011.

“We hope to get 50 communities and 100,000 students participating in the initiative which allows grade 5-14 student design of real experiments to fly aboard Atlantis, and engages entire communities,” Dr. Jeff Goldstein, the Director for the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education told Universe Today. “This is very unique opportunity for students and teachers to be part of a high visibility, keystone U.S. national STEM education program of the highest caliber.”

SSEP is a new program that launched in June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, a company that is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.

The company hopes to stimulate space station research by providing a very low-cost 1 kilogram platform that puts micro-gravity projects within the reach of universities and small companies, as well as elementary and secondary schools through SSEP. So, this is actually a commercial space program and not a NASA program.

This opportunity offers real research done on orbit, with students designing and proposing the experiments to fly in low Earth orbit.

Goldstein said the program is a U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives up to 3,200 students across a community—middle and high school students (grades 5-12), and/or undergraduates at 2-year community colleges (grades 13-14)—the ability to fly their own experiments in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then later on the International Space Station.

For the STS-134 mission, now scheduled to launch in April 2011, 16 communities were chosen to participate from 447 student team proposals. Goldstein said the 16 selected experiments are now moving through formal NASA Flight Safety review.

But the end of the shuttle mission is not the end of this program – instead it is just the beginning. “This is meant to be a gateway to Phase 2 of the program, which will allow routine access to space for students conducting experiments, said Goldstein. “SSEP was designed to engage and inspire America’s next generation of scientists and engineers through immersion in real science. We believe that ‘student as scientist’ represents the very best in science education.”

What type of experiments would be accepted? Students and teachers should discuss what biological, chemical or physical system they would like to explore with no gravity off for 10 days. Examples of experiments are seed germination cell biology, life cycles of organisms, food preservation, and crystal growth. The SSEP program will help guide the teachers through implementation of the program in their classrooms.

Each participating school district will be provided an experiment slot in an easy-to-use real microgravity research mini-laboratory flying on Space Shuttle Atlantis. The SSEP center will then guide the school districts through an experiment design competition within the grade 5-12 range, which can be conducted across a single school, or district-wide to as many as 3,200 students. Student teams then design real experiments vying for your reserved slot on this historic flight, with designs constrained by mini-laboratory operation.

Other benefits of the program include a customized Blog for students and teachers to report on their program, and a design competition for each school to have a 4-inch x 4-inch emblem that we will fly aboard the Shuttle and returned to the school.

There is uncertainty, however, whether the STS-135 mission will fly. Funding for the additional STS-135 mission was authorized by Congress on September 29, 2010, and the authorization was signed by President Obama. NASA is currently awaiting Congressional allocation of funds for STS-135. On January 20, 2011, NASA formally added STS-135 to its launch schedule. Goldstein said there is now a high probability that STS-135 will indeed fly. But when it flies is the issue.

Because of the timing of when NASA needs to have a list of material that will be used in the experiments so that they can do a flight safety review, the SSEP program needs NASA to slip the launch date from June 28, 2011 until at least August 31, 2011. They fully expect this to occur given the significant launch slips that have occurred for STS-133 and STS-134, and the conversations already taking place in NASA.

But it is now time critical for schools to be able to participate. There is a proposal submission deadline of May 12, 2011. By the end of May, the flight experiments will be selected, so that NASA can be provided with the materials list 3 months in advance of launch.

For more information see the SSEP website

Testimonials for SSEP on STS-134

Watch a video of Dr. Jeff Goldstein talking about SSEP.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

How Do You Pronounce ‘Uranus’?


Uranus is the planet with the funny name and the odd orientation. So, when you say the word ‘Uranus’ do you stress the first syllable or the second? Or, perhaps you do as Dr. Pamela Gay suggests, in order to avoid “being made fun of by any small schoolchildren … when in doubt, don’t emphasize anything and just say ‘Uranus.’ And then run, quickly.”

This video is the latest offering from “Sixty Symbols,” a video series put together by the University of Nottingham which provides explanations for the “squiggly lines and Greek letters that astronomers and physicists use to describe physical properties of the Universe and how they apply to modern life,” said Dr. Amanda Bauer, who gave a presentation about Sixty Symbols at the dotAstronomy conference I attended in December (and who is the first person you see on the Uranus video.)

Sixty Symbols covers symbols like Lambda and the Hubble Constant (H) to the speed of light (c), imaginary numbers (j) and propulsion efficiency — explaining their meanings in everyday language, and taking advantage of the passion and the unique senses of humor the scientists at The University of Nottingham all seem to possess!

Bauer said, however, the real genius behind these videos is filmmaker Brady Haran.

In the fall of 2009, the Sixty Symbols team completed their first sixty symbols, and they proved so popular they are now working on another sixty. The project follows The University of Nottingham’s ‘Periodic Table of Videos’ project , which features an entertaining short film about the properties of every single element in the Periodic Table, from aluminium to xenon.

Check out the Sixty Symbols website, and the Sixty Symbols You Tube site to learn more

You can also watch Bauer’s dotAstronomy presentation about Sixty Symbols here.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Accessible Astronomy: Touching the Night Sky

Caption: A page from “Touch the Universe.” Image courtesy of Noreen Grice.

The stunning images provided by space- and ground-based telescopes are visual wonders to behold. But those who are visually impaired can also enjoy astronomical images thanks to the work of Noreen Grice. For 25 years Grice has been working to make sure astronomy is accessible for everyone, including those who are blind or have low vision, as well as those who have impaired hearing. She has created of a series of books and other products that are designed to bring the universe to everyone.

Grice’s five astronomy books are accessible with text in both print and Braille along with pictures that are touchable. Using tactile overlays of line drawings of stars, planets, comets and other objects, real pictures come to life for the visually impaired. But they can also be shared by sighted people as well.

Listen to an interview with Noreen Grice by Carolyn Collins Petersen on the January 14th edition of 365 Days of Astronomy. Also visit Petersen’s website, The SpaceWriter, for additional info.

Her motivation came from a group of blind students who attended a planetarium show she presented in 1984 at the Boston Museum of Science, and she says those students opened her eyes to the need for accessibility in science education. “After the show was over, I asked them about their experience, and they told me the show ‘stunk,'” Grice said, “and it got me thinking — why can’t astronomy be accessible for everyone?”

She began by etching constellations, planets and star clusters, and galaxies on plastic by hand to use at the planetarium. But then she got the idea to try and create a book.

Touch the Invisible Sky by Noreen Grice, Simon Steel and Doris Daou

“For my first book, Touch the Stars, I wanted the pictures to be raised up and touchable, with the text imprinted in Braille,” Grice told Universe Today. “But when my second book came out, Touch the Universe, which was made using Hubble images, I felt like there was no way these pictures should just be line drawings because they are so colorful and beautiful. So from that point on that I’ve made the pictures in color and touchable, and the text is in both print and Braille.”

Grice said books that are just in Braille or are “touch only” books continue to make barriers for people. “One of the problems is that there are few resources for blind people, and those that are available are completely separate from books for the sighted,” she said. “I wanted to break down the barriers and bring people together so that everyone could use the same materials.”

That means that blind and sighted family members can enjoy Grice’s book together, and for students in a classroom, it means all students can use the same book, instead of having a “special” or different book for blind students.

“I want to break down barriers, and it is great that everyone in a classroom can use the same book,” she said. “Plus, it turns out our books are helpful for sighted people, as it makes it understandable for everyone, and provides a way to meet the needs of a variety of learning styles.”

Grice has worked in conjunction NASA and other astronomers and educators to create her books. Recently, she finished working on a book called Touch the Earth, which includes tactile images, and also has DVD for audio and sign language.

Noreen Grice at the AAS meeting, showing the Tactile Carina Nebula.

At the American Astronomical Society Meeting last week, Grice shared with astronomers the Tactile Carina Nebula, which was created from a large Hubble mosaic of images. By working with scientists Grice was able to include touchable variations for the different regions and objects in the image.

See this website for more info on the Tactile Carina Nebula.

Grice said she has had blind students contact her, or come up to her at National Federation of the Blind conventions who say because they read her books they have developed an interest in space and astronomy. “I know two students who are determined to be the first blind astronauts and another who wants to be an astronomer,” she said. “There is a whole universe out there, and I know that anyone can become a scientist and contribute to the scientific endeavor.”

Grice still works at the Boston Museum of Science and she shared that just recently a hearing impaired family came to the planetarium show. “I realized they were hearing impaired and told them we had captioning available,” Grice said. “It took me less than a minute to give them everything they needed, and they were so appreciative. The situation was a complete opposite of what it was in 1984, and it just confirmed that all my hard work in making the planetarium seamlessly accessible for everyone was worth it.”

For more information, check out You Can Do Astronomy, the website for Grice’s company

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Exploring to the Beat of Pulsars

PULSE@Parkes project. Credit: Andrew Crosling

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An innovative project that provides high school students in Australia the opportunity to work with the famous Parkes radio telescope will soon make the data available to schools around the world. The PULSE@Parkes project allows for hands-on remote observing of pulsars producing real-time data, which then becomes part of a growing database used by professional astronomers. “Students can help monitor pulsars and identify unusual ones or detect sudden glitches in their rotation,” said Rob Hollow from the Australia Telescope National Facility, and coordinator for the PULSE@Parkes project. “They can also help determine the distance to existing pulsars.”

Initially, the project was only available to schools in Australia, but PULSE@Parkes hopes to expand globally, allowing students to collaborate on monitoring pulsar data. The first international session will be held on Dec. 7, 2009 at Cardiff University in the UK.

“We had the challenge to develop and implement simulation radio astronomy activities for high school students, providing the opportunity for them to actually use a radio telescope facility and engage with professional scientists,” said Hollow, speaking at the .Astronomy (dot Astronomy) conference this week in Leiden, The Netherlands. “We also wanted to have students doing science that is appropriate for them and useful for professional astronomers.”

Students in Sydney controlling the Parkes radio telescope. Credit: R. Hollow, CSIRO
Students in Sydney controlling the Parkes radio telescope. Credit: R. Hollow, CSIRO

Hollow said that even though radio astronomy data consists of squiggly lines, students are still engaged by the results, even without the pretty pictures produced by other astronomical instruments. “It works surprisingly well, and the visuals haven’t been as big an issue and we thought,” Hollow said. “But in looking at pulsars, the students do get the pulse profiles and they get immediate feedback.”

Plus, when the dish actually moves in response to the students’ inputs, they really become engaged. “There’s a real ‘wow’ factor in being able to control the telescope,” Hollow said. “The students pick it up quickly, and they really like that they are contributing to science.”

Recently, the first science paper was published using results obtained by students.

The program is done remotely, and students view webcams of the telescope and control room. They control the telescope directly via the internet, monitor the data in real time, and use Skype to communicate with astronomers at Parkes.

So far, Hollow said, they have done 25 sessions, with 28 schools, working with about 450 students. “This project is not just for gift and talented students,” he said, “and any school can apply.”

The Parkes Radio Telescope. Credit: R. Hollow, CSIRO
The Parkes Radio Antenna. Credit: R. Hollow, CSIRO

Parkes is a 64 m diameter radio antenna that was built in 1961. Hollow said the dish has received regular updates and is still on the cutting edge of science. Most famously, Parkes was to receive video from the Apollo mission to the Moon.

Hollow said he sees PULSE@Parkes as just the beginning of working with students. The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will be coming online in just a couple of years, with thirty-six 12-meter dishes. “This will provide for very fast surveys that will increase the area of coverage and increase the capability for sensitivity,” Hollow said. “From ASKAP, we’ll be getting massive data sets, which will provide more opportunity for student and public involvement.

For more information, including an audio of what a pulsar “sounds” like, as well as info for schools and teachers, requirements, and how to apply visit the PULSE@Parkes website