Artemis Moon Pod Essay Contest

Only available for our American friends.  Drats.  

NASA is taking remote learning to the Moon! 2020 has been a year of working and living at a distance. Now consider what it might be like if you were living with a pod of astronauts 250,000 miles from Earth. Your challenge is to imagine leading a one-week expedition at the Moon’s South Pole – with the whole world cheering you on. Tell us about the types of skills, attributes, and/or personality traits that you would want your Moon Pod crew to have and why. How many would be in your pod? And of course you’ll need high tech gear and gadgets! In your essay, also describe one machine, robot, or technology that you would leave on the lunar surface to help future astronauts explore the Moon. Your entry must meet these requirements:

Grades K-4: Essay, up to 100 words

Grades 5-8: Essay, up to 200 words

Grades 9-12: Essay, up to 300 words

Please DO NOT put your name in your entry.

To see the contest website click here.

NASA's Interactive Solar System Exploration

If you are teaching anything about the solar system you might want to check out NASA's interactive solar system exploration website.  There is information about our solar system, its planets, their moons, its guests such as asteroids, meteors and comets and other information.  To see the site click here.

NASA Infographics

If you are teaching a space science course and would like to make some posters for your classroom or put an infographic in your webpage this site is for you.  They have a wack load of infographics.  To see their site, click here.

Oxygen, Oxidation and Combustion Lessons

This is a three-lesson mini-unit on oxygen, oxidation and combustion, produced by NASA.  To see the 22 page lesson plan click here.

Rocket Science 101

If you are teaching Rocket Science here is is an iphone and ipad app from NASA.  It is available for free at Itunes by clicking here. 

 If you would like more information about launching rockets you might want to go the NASA website by clicking here.

If you are a teacher you may want to go to their educator site by clicking here.

Space Math @ NASA

From their website, "SpaceMath@NASA introduces students to the use of mathematics in todays scientific discoveries. Through press releases and other articles, we explore how many kinds of mathematics skills come together in exploring the universe

The problem sheets that they have are real world problems and include answer sheets.  I peaked at the Calculus section and some of the problems might be a tad advanced for some students but their were definitely some good sheets there.  For example "Rotation Velocity of a Galaxy #106".  This would make a nice sheet in Grade 12 Functions or in Calculus.  

To see their website click here.

Harvest Moon

The Harvest Moon will appear this week and NASA ScienceCasts explains the Harvest Moon in this video.

TIME Timelapse powered by Google

On Thursday May 9th, Time, Google, NASA and USGS released Timelapse powered by Google.  You can watch the last 30 years of satellite photography of anywhere on earth.  According to Louis Perrochon,     "We sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year."

They have selected a few very stunning timelapses for you to view by clicking here.  You can move around the world and zoom in anywhere.  This might be an interesting tool in the classroom to look at erosion or climate change.  I have zoomed in on the east side of Windsor, east of the WFCU center.  You will notice a large rectangular green area gets built up over the last 30 years around the Banwell Hill - St. Josephs area as highlighted in the red box below.

If you would like to watch the development of this area click here.  You can zoom out or move anywhere else in the world you would like.  When you are done, if you would like to share the new view, click on the icon that looks like this