NASA Experiment Contest

Anyone want to give it a shot?

NASA – Kids In Micro-g!: “The experiment demonstration must take no more than 30 minutes to set up, run and take down. Experiment challenge winners and runners-up will be selected regionally and nationally by the Education Offices of the ten NASA centers. The ten regional winners, one national winner and one national runner up winner will have their experiments conducted by the Astronauts on board the ISS in the April-May 2010 timeframe. The experiments will be recorded onboard in HD video and the winners supplied with copies of their video before the end of their school year. “

Why Am I a Science Teacher?

When I was in 7th grade (way back in the early 1990′s), my dad gave me my first computer. Of course, this was before the days of the World Wide Web being used as it is today, so there wasn’t much “mult-media” accessible on the computer (not that it could have handled much to begin with!). However, I did have a CD-ROM (be thankful those are mostly antiques now) of “Famous Speeches” that came with the computer.

I only remember watching one video on that disc, and it was this one. It changed my life and made me dream beyond my small hometown. I still cry every time Pres. Kennedy says “Why some say go to the Moon?…”

This is a video about dreaming, determination, freedom and humanity’s greatness.

As a result of this speech (and watching it countless times on my now-ancient computer collecting dust in my parent’s attic), I’m a science teacher.

Dream big.

The View

This is just awesome:

The View

Astronaut Michael Good peers through a window toward Atlantis’ crew cabin interior, where his shirt-sleeved support team members busy themselves to aid the flight’s second of five spacewalks to perform work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronaut Mike Massimino can be seen in the background at work on the port side of the shuttle’s cargo bay.

Image Credit: NASA

Launch Video for STS 125

By the end of the school year, you’ll understand most of the incredible science behind how we can launch such a heavy object(s) into orbit (it involves more than “rockets go boom” but that’s a part of it)!

Amazing.

Keep up to date with this mission to Hubble Telescope (the last one!) via NASA.

By the way, we’ll be talking about Simple Machines this year, but did you know the Space Shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built?

Archimedes would be proud (you’ll get to know him very well this year)!

STS 125 Launches Today

The 125th Space Shuttle mission launches today, and it’s a big day for science!

NASA has a fantastic interactive webpage they’ve built for the mission so you can learn more about the mission’s goals (always good to have those!), the astronauts and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thanks to the principles of acceleration, trajectory, projectiles, chemical reactions, gravity etc (we’ll be studying all of these in the coming year!), not only are we sending humans, a vehicle (the Space Shuttle is a vehicle, after all) and a great deal of heavy equipment into orbit around our planet, but this is the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Telescope is, by all accounts, the greatest science experiment of all time (we’ll be doing a few of those this year as well). So, it’s sad that this will be the last time that we’ll be visiting this marvel of human accomplishment, but we’ll certainly be receiving wonderful images from Hubble for years to come.

However, the Hubble has been in orbit for a long time and it’s provided us with an amazing amount of data and information that we could have never gotten from a telescope here on earth (we’ll talk about that this year, too!). How long has the Hubble been in orbit around earth? Believe it or not, the Hubble was launched aboard a space shuttle waaaayyy back when I was finishing my 7th grade year in 1990! That’s right. So, the telescope is old, but it has aged well!

We’ll be covering more about why telescopes work the way they do, why the Hubble is/was so important for science and some of the results from the data that we’ve received from the Hubble.

In the meantime, enjoy the Shuttle launch today at 2:01pm, which you can watch live on NASA TV!