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Welcome to KidSat! As you know, KidSat is a NASA-funded education project, still in its pilot phase, that is designed to "understand and demonstrate how middle school students can actively make observations of the Earth by using mounted cameras onboard the Space Shuttle to conduct scientific inquiry in support of their middle school curriculum."  (The KidSat Mission Statement is attached). 

Your school will be one of the 15 middle schools around the country participating in the next phase of this program.  The KidSat camera flew for the first time on a Space Shuttle flight last March.  That flight was a resounding success, and encouraged us to expand the program from 3 to 15 participating schools.  The camera's next Space Shuttle flight is currently scheduled for early December.

During the summer you'll be receiving background information on the KidSat program, and suggested lessons, handouts, and activities designed to help you prepare your students for their participation in the project.  Much of this material will be "on paper"; some of it will be on the World Wide Web (if you haven't used the web yet, don't worry: we'll be introducing it to you shortly).

No NASA program is complete without its own jargon, and KidSat has already developed its share.  We've come to refer to participating schools as "SMOCs".  SMOC stands for Student Mission Operations Center, and is intended to convey the idea that during the Space Shuttle mission your school will have a room set up something like a NASA operations center, with students actively planning photography of the Earth from the Space Shuttle.  Your students will be able to select sites on the Earth to photograph, then calculate when the shuttle will pass over those sites, and transmit that information to the KidSat "Mission Control Gateway" (that's us, here at UCSD). We then relay your selections (through NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston) to the KidSat camera on the Space Shuttle.

This "operations center" at your school will require reasonably capable computers with internet connections; this is the reason we have certain minimum technical requirements that your school must meet.  We have been in contact with representatives from the Education Office at [NASA***]; they are working with your school to ensure that there are no technical obstacles to your participation.  Your school is responsible for providing and maintaining the necessary computers and their connection to the internet.  The software you will need (and there's not much of it) is free to educational institutions.

The Space Shuttle flight that will be carrying our camera is "STS-81" (the 81st Shuttle flight), now scheduled to launch on December 5, 1996. That date could

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