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JoBea Way,9/1895 4:12 PM,Draft of KidSat release  2

>the KidSat program, including Samuel Gompers Secondary School in San 
>Diego, Calif., Buist Academy in Charleston, S.C. and the Washington 
>Accelerated Learning Center in Pasadena, Calif. Each year, additional 
>classrooms in these areas will be added to the pilot program, as will 
>new schools in Omaha, Houston, and Baltimore school districts. By 
>the end of the pilot program -- when the KidSat information 
>superhighway has been set up, the KidSat curriculum has been developed 
>and tested, and a payload has been installed on the space station for >continuous accessibility to space -- the programs will be open to any 
>school district in the country.
>
> KidSat will allow students in urban and rural schools to use
>data from live shuttle missions for a variety of purposes, added
>Elizabeth Jones Stork, director of the western regional branch of The
>Johns Hopkins University Institute for the Academic Advancement of
>Youth, which is developing the educational component of the program.
>The images and data students are able to obtain from these missions
>will be used in their studies of geography and history, as well as
>mathematics and Earth sciences.
>
> In the design and mission oeprations part of the program,
>children will learn basic principles of gravity, geometry and scales
>of the Earth, Stork said. They will be able to study an array of
>current events -- such as the flooding of the Mississippi River,
>volcanic eruptions, or the advance of deforestation in the Amazon --
>to understand the impact of natural and human activity on the
>environment. History, in turn, can be recreated by imaging, for
>example, regions of the East Coast where famous battles of the Civil
>War were fought.
>
> "KidSat will provide an innovative way to present materials to 
>students and will underscore the opportunities they have to comprehend
>and master concepts that are being presented," Stork said. "In turn,
>those experiences will challenge young explorers and encourage them to
>apply their skills to real world issues."
>
> The first KidSat payloads to fly aboard the space shuttle will
>consist of a Kodak digital still camera mounted in the overheard
>window of the space shuttle, and two video cameras mounted in the
>shuttle's cargo bay. Students will decide which regions of the world
>are scientifically or historically interesting to them, then operate
>their cameras to photograph those regions. They may decide to study
>the volcanic "Ring of Fire" that surrounds the Pacific Ocean, the
>Himalayas or view the western European theater in which many battles
>of World War II unfolded. 
>
> KidSat represents an investment in the nation's future, giving
>kids exposure to environmental studies from low-Earth orbit, said Dr.
>Sally Ride, former astronaut and currently professor of physics at the 
>University of California, San Diego. Dr. Ride is leading the
>development of the mission operations element of KidSat with the
>support of NASA's Johnson Space Center and an enthusiastic team of
>undergraduate and graduate students.
>
> "By attaching KidSat to the space shuttle, students will be
>able to participate in space exploration as astronauts and cosmonauts
>do," she said.
>
> Once the program has been established, the KidSat instruments
>themselves may be replaced by more elaborate instruments, such as an
>atmospheric, remote-sensing instrument and the technologies needed to
>create a full telepresence in space. Using JPL's digital image
>animation lab and virtual reality headsets, students will be able to
>"fly" over Earth, learning more about the geographic and atmospheric
>relationships that drive Earth's climate and seasons. The program will
>also benefit from new, state-of-the-art optical technologies being
>developed at JPL.
>
> A mission control "gateway" located at the University of
>California, San Diego, is being linked to student mission operations
>centers at the three participating schools this year. The operations
>centers at UCSD and the pilot schools will be staffed by students and
>designed in very simple ways so that they can be replicated at
>participating schools in the future. Students connecting on-line to
>the KidSat gateway will be able to operate their cameras from their
>classrooms. The images will be available in near real-time over the 
>Internet from the KidSat data system located at JPL.
>
> Teachers from Pasadena, San Diego, Charleston, Omaha and
>Humbolt (County?, Calif.?) are working with scientists and engineers


Printed for sride@ucsd.edu (Sally K. Ride)