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Ed Campion                  April 28, 2003
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone:  301/286-8955)

Martos Hoffman
TERC Center for Earth and Space Science Education
(Phone: 928/779-5585)

RELEASE: 03-43

ISS EARTHKAM ENCOURAGES NEXT GENERATION OF NASA SCIENTISTS

Middle school students participating in NASA's International Space 
Station (ISS) EarthKAM education program will help scientists from 
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center study Earth's changing surface by 
taking pictures from the ISS April 29-May 2. ISS EarthKAM is an 
educational program in which students control, via Internet 
connections, a high-resolution digital camera operating on the 
International Space Station's Destiny science module.

This unique partnership benefits both middle school students as well 
as research scientists. Students profit by being involved in the 
process of real scientific research as well as through their 
interaction with scientists as they collaborate on the analysis of 
the research images. Students gain significant first-hand knowledge 
about the topics of research including global tectonics, faulting, 
volcanoes, river and lake systems, as well as land-use changes and 
humanity's impact on Earth's surface.

Nikki Woxberg's students at McNair Magnet School in Cocoa, Florida 
worked with Jacob Yates, a NASA geologist, during an ISS EarthKAM 
mission in early April. Woxberg pointed to the benefits of the ISS 
EarthKAM-Scientist partnership. "It gave meaning to what the students 
were studying. They worked especially hard to make sure that the 
image requests they sent up to the ISS were the very best possible." 
Woxberg continued, "Having direct involvement of scientists added 
significant excitement and seriousness to the whole learning
process."

Scientist Yates indicated that, "This partnership provides immediate 
dividends to student education as well as science. Student 
experiences are enriched by our interactions while valuable image 
data, that otherwise might have been missed, is acquired by the 
students." He added that, "We view this as an opportunity to help 
encourage the next generation of NASA scientists."

ISS EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School students) was 
created by Dr. Sally Ride, America's first woman astronaut, in 1994. 
Over 8,500 high-quality digital pictures of Earth have since been 
taken by middle-school students. All are publicly available on the 
Web.  During the early April ISS EarthKAM operating period, 71 
schools representing 23 states and four countries took 696 pictures 
of Earth.

Two schools, experienced with ISS EarthKAM operations, will 
participate in the ISS EarthKAM student-scientist partnership during 
the April 29-May 2 operating period. It is expected that this pilot 
project will expand with successive ISS EarthKAM missions.

An additional ISS EarthKAM picture-taking mission is scheduled for 
November of 2003. Four additional operating periods are scheduled for 
2004.

Schools interested in participating in this free educational program 
should contact ISS EarthKAM at http://www.earthkam.ucsd.edu.

For more information about NASA's Office of Education visit:
http://education.nasa.gov

For more information about the TERC Center for Earth and Space 
Science Education visit:
http://www.terc.edu/

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