EarthKAM Gives Students Rare Glimpse At Earth Who needs Rand McNally when you can have cutting-edge Earth satellite images at your fingertips? With the help of an Earth-aimed camera mounted on the NASA space shuttle that flew last month, hundreds of middle school students across the globe got some hands-on education
and changed the meaning of studying in a "multimedia" classroom. The EarthKAM project, a collaboration between NASA and participating middle schools, lets students shoot digital images of Earth from the camera on board the space shuttle. This February, students used EarthKAM to snap a record 2,715 images -- more than four times as many as the previous shuttle mission, and over 700 more than the roughly 2,000 total EarthKAM images taken before this year.
"We were very pleased to be a payload on this shuttle mission because its sole purpose was to map Earths surface at a very stable orbit," said Karen Flammer, University of California at San Diego (UCSD) researcher and EarthKAM specialist. "The previous four flights we were on were Mir rendezvous flights, so we werent taking pictures while we were docked with the space station."
An EarthKAM closeup of the Darling River in New South Wales, Australia.
Nestled in one of Endeavor's two overhead windows, EarthKAM was controlled almost completely by students and their teachers, with commands they sent via the internet. After kids specified which areas of the globe they wanted to shoot, EarthKAM snapped the appropriate pictures and beamed the information back down to Earth. Hours later, participating schools retrieved their images through top-secret websites maintained by NASA.
EarthKAM, which stands for "Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students," is the brainchild of UCSD professor and SPACE.com president Sally Ride. Originally called Kidsat, EarthKAM has grown into a $1 million-a-year endeavor, with 83 schools currently participating worldwide. It was flown on five shuttle missions, making its maiden voyage in 1996.
"This is truly the most awesome project weve ever been involved with," said Diane Bowen, an eighth-grade science teacher at participating Brunswick Junior High School in Maine.
EarthKAM captures a mountainous region of British Columbia in Canada.
Participating teachers report that NASA's "classified" EarthKAM program has great appeal with students. Students and teachers involved with the project are given special code words that allow access to sites where they can specify their desired EarthKAM targets.
"The experience of students gathering information about the shuttle, using it to find a photo location, and then doing research on that location is an exciting learning process," explained Bob Curley, assistant principal at participating South Lake Middle School in Irvine, California. "To actually be able to see things like differences in elevation is eye-opening for kids," he said.
Kelly Cabana, a seventh grader at South Lake, agreed.
"Using EarthKAM was an amazing experience because you get to do it yourself," she said. "Seeing the finished product was the best thing -- I would recommend it to anyone!"
NASA releases all EarthKAM images to the general public. Photos are available to download through the official
EarthKAM website. Februarys shuttle flight was the last of its kind for EarthKAM. However, the camera will become a permanent fixture aboard the International Space Station sometime next year. Students from around the world will have opportunities to use EarthKAM once monthly for three or four days at a time. Flammer said her hope is to increase the number of participating schools to the thousands. "Theres no limit to what we can do," she said.
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