39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

Geosteph and I are leaving this weekend to travel to TX for the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It's a week-long conference for international planetary scientists and educators to present their current research and mission results. The conference consists of both talks and poster presentations on a variety of subjects. View the enitre program, which includes links to the abstracts.

On Sunday, Geosteph will help lead a workshop called Reaching the Moon for planetary scientists and educators. Then on Wednesday we'll both lead a workshop for educators called Fire and Ice about the MESSENGER mission to Mercury and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. There may still be slots available for these workshops. Click here to learn more.

On Tuesday, we will be presenting a poster on Tuesday night in the Education and Public Outreach Programs session to accompany our abstract, which is about how NASA might use Second Life for informal space science education and participatory exploration.

If we're lucky, Geosteph might tweet from the meeting so stay tuned!

How much ice might be on Mercury? Use math to find out!

The NASA MESSENGER spacecraft performed its first flyby of Mercury on January 14, 2008. In addition to mapping the entire surface of the planet, one of its goals is to shed new light on the existence of ice in the polar regions of this hot planet. Ice on Mercury? It's not as strange as it seems! Click here to learn more and to access a pdf that provides a series of space math questions (and an answer key) related to this topic. For more classroom activities related to ice in on Mercury and elsewhere in our solar system click here. For more space math problems visit http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov. A new space math problem is added every week!

LRO Looking like a spacecraft!

Howdy folks. Last week was a really exciting week for us here at Goddard Space Flight Center. On Thursday, February 28, four of the six outermost panels were attached to the propulsion module! We were sure to capture the exciting progress so all of you could see it too! The video included in this blog shows the hard-working people of LRO in the clean room assembling the bits and pieces of the spacecraft. You'll first see the avionics panel being set upright. Then the propulsion tank assembly is brought into the tent, and the instrument module, reaction wheel, and avionics panels are attached. As you can see, our little spacecraft is growing up!

NASA and Gen Y Perspectives

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This presentation was produced by four young NASA employees. They presented it at the Next Generation Exploration Conference held earlier this month at NASA Ames Research Center. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin was in the audience. The presentation was remarked upon by Wired a few days ago. According to Wired, "The presentation chronicles their love of space and the heartbreak of working at an agency that has had such a tough time connecting with the rest of their generation and getting them excited about space. It also talks about how important the under 30 crowd is. They are the ones who will pay for the bulk of the cost of the return to the Moon. By 2014, they will comprise 47% of the workforce. Is NASA ready? How can we help?"

Shared with permission.


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