Students to Use Shuttle Camera to Spy on EarthPASADENA, Calif. Sometimes a tired old classroom globe just wont do for a middle-school geography lesson at the dawn of the 21st century.
Thats why, during STS 99, students drawn from dozens of schools the world round are participating in a project to give them, literally, the freshest global view of our planet.
Called EarthKAM, the project allows middle-school students to take digital photographs of the world from the orbiting space shuttle images that are then beamed into their classrooms via the internet mere hours after they have been snapped.
"When youre looking at the Earth from that perspective, you have a better sense of how things work in terms of natural processes," said Paul Andres of NASAs
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helps process the images and make them available to the students. "Its an inspirational carrot to understand all the things the students learn in school." (Former astronaut and University of California-San Diego physics professor Sally Ride manages EarthKAM, originally called KidSat. Ride is also president of SPACE.com.)
STS 99 is the fifth flight of the $1 million-a-year project, which first got off the ground in 1996 with the participation of just three schools. The current flight has about 83 schools taking part.
EarthKAM uses a Kodak digital camera mounted on a Nikon body tucked in one of the two overhead windows in the shuttles flight deck. Although the shuttle astronauts set the camera up, it is hundreds of students who huddle behind its lens, snapping the images of the Earth features they choose.
"Its fun because you get to see all this different stuff," said Jenna Longfellow, 13, an 8th grade student at Olive Peirce Middle School in Ramona, California. "You can see all these different places from above."
Students took about 2,000 images over the course of the previous four shuttle flights, all of which involved the re-usable spacecraft docking with the Mir space station.
On those missions, the camera spent just four days at a stretch in the window; the current Endeavour mission to map the world in three dimensions will allow for about 10 days of picture taking. That could mean double the number of EarthKAM pictures.
"It looks like its going to be the best mission we ever had," said Dave Reynolds, a science teacher at Olive Peirce and a veteran of two previous EarthKAM flights. About 150 of his students are taking part in STS 99.
"It shows them being accurate counts," Reynolds said of the program, which requires the students to precisely target locations on the Earth using both longitude and latitude. "The typical middle school student thinks they can hand anything in and have it count. On this, if you switch long and lat, it doesnt work."
STS 99 will be the last shuttle flight for EarthKAM. A version of the camera will next fly on the
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