Viewing page 19 of 208
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
1.7 Student Involvement Students were involved in two different roles. There were those in middle schools and universities who worked hand-in-hand with the scientists and engineers. The older students were responsible for building the project. They worked on designing and building the systems, writing the software, developing the Web pages, and operating the various systems during the missions. The middle school students were responsible for selecting the images and analyzing these images as part of their curriculum. In addition, a number of local university students supported the middle school students in the technical setup and operation of the Student Mission Operations Centers (SMOCs) and in the analysis of the images. At JPL, the majority of students were from La Cañada High School. They worked on KidSat as part of the Institutes for the 21st Century, a business and professional mentorship program. Other high school students participated as part of the State of California's School to Career Program. Some undergraduate students were involved through the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and Teaching and Interdisciplinary Education (TIDE) programs, while other college students were JPL employees. At UCSD, the majority of the students were undergraduates, but they received some assistance from graduate students, especially in the development years. Middle school students were chosen to be the "explorers" for the pilot program because the program could complement many areas that the students were already studying: math, geography, history, computer science, and Earth science. KidSat could fit into a teacher's curriculum without inhibiting other areas of study. In fact, the program enhanced the other subject areas by associating them with an area of interest, space exploration, which encouraged students to want to learn. Initially, middle schools were selected on the basis of three criteria: urban location, proximity to one of the institutional partners, and/or previous involvement with a space shuttle mission. Later, schools associated with NASA centers across the country were brought into the program. The number of middle schools grew, starting with just three for STS-76 to 52 for STS-86. 1.8 KidSat Infrastructure The overall command and data flow between the ground and shuttle utilized the Internet and an existing infrastructure of NASA satellites. In the classrooms, students used the Internet, orbit maps, and atlases to develop commands that specified the times for photographing the Earth. These commands were sent to the KidSat Mission Control Gateway at UCSD, where they were integrated with similar commands from other classrooms into a single Camera Control File (CCF). This CCF was checked and sent via the Internet to NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, where it was subsequently sent up to the shuttle that included DOMSAT, White Sands, TDRSS, and the shuttle's Ku-band system. Once onboard, the CCF controlled the times where photographs were taken. These photographs were then downloaded, usually during the night side of each ninety-minute orbit, through the same TDRSS/White Sands/DOMSAT system to JSC. The images were then sent to KidSat at JPL in Pasadena, California, via the NASA Science Network (NSN). Once at JPL, the images were automatically processed and loaded into the KidSat Data System, and were available to the classrooms on the Internet only a few hours after capture and a few minutes after hitting the ground. The images were accessed in the classrooms during the mission for validation and annotation, and were studied and developed into post-mission explorations. The student-enhanced images were stored and are available on the Web so that students can share their discoveries via the Internet. For more detailed information about how the KidSat project was started and organized, see Way et al., 1999. 6
