Discovery From Rockets to Space

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Eighty years ago, Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket on March 16, 1926. Never could he have imagined the dramatic technological advances, engineering achievements, and scientific discoveries that evolved from his project he lovingly called the "little rocket."

The Vision for Space Exploration challenges our capabilities as a space fairing nation to enable humans to live and work on the moon, and continue onward to Mars and beyond. This symposium will present the architecture and systems, the engineering and technology, the science, and the challenges we face in this endeavor of human and robotic exploration as we begin the next 80 years. (Dr. Goddard speaking: It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of today is the reality of tomorrow.

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Pioneers of View Space

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I'm John Stoke. I'm manager for Informal Science Education for the Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach. Americans, by tens of millions, visit cultural institutions such as science centers, museums, planetariums, and libraries every year. They go in search of meaning and opportunities to improve themselves and understand more. And then, there are millions of other Americans who visit places like nature centers and national parks searching for opportunities to see the beauty of the night sky.

Our goal with the ViewSpace project was to reach these people with the opportunity to just experience the kaleidoscope of beautiful images and scientific discoveries that NASA is delivering from the universe. We've done this by partnering with museums, planetariums, science centers and the like, to give them what they need the most - their real stock-in-trade, which is up-to-date exhibitory. Through a network of high resolution plasma screens and projection theaters, and communities large and small, we deliver interpretive science content, automatically, every day, just uploaded over the internet.

ViewSpace began as a Hubble outreach project, but we soon realized that both our sponsors and our end users would benefit from us using the network to deliver a broader spectrum of NASA space science. More recently, we've begun to partner with NASA's Earth Observatory team at Goddard to bring their amazing insights about the Blue Planet to our audience.

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Robotic Competition

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Hi, my name is Mike Wade and I work here at the Goddard Space Flight Center. I work with a program called FIRST, and FIRST stands for Recognition and Inspiration in Science and Technology.

The kids here are competing in a robotics competition where they were given six weeks to design and build a robot and now they have a chance to hone their championship skills in the arena against the other teams.

NASA's pleased to be involved this year. We're supplying mentors and engineers to these students to try to motivate them to go into the engineering and technology related field. We do that by working directly with the schools, providing machine shop support to the regional and championship events, and try to show these kids that engineering can be fun.

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History of Winter

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Winter comes to Lake Placid New York as a consequence of the orbit of the tilted Earth. During this time, snow begins to fall when the clouds become cold enough, and the surface of the lake begins to freeze, from top down. And what we do in the History of Winter is we apply stratigraphy. The geologic stratigraphy helps us to understand the history of the earth. Consequently, the stratigraphy of the snow on the ground and in the thickness of the lake ice helps us to understand the history of winter. Over the years, since 2001, we’ve had many different kinds of groups, mostly teachers, and the main idea is to imbed them - don’t teach them how to teach, but give them scientific content and have a real understanding of how science is done using snow and ice.

So we put together a team. I’m Peter Wasilewski, a scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Most of the time is spent out doors and we apply the same basic techniques that NASA scientists, NOAA scientists, and weather scientists use to study snow and ice, and it's almost like ground validation to verify the accuracy of sensors on NASA satellites that look down at the cryosphere. So a very good connection between what we do up there and what NASA does here at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Sun-Earth Day

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Hi, I'm Lou Mayo. I work for Raytheon at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on their Space Science Data Operations Contract. I'm also a planetary scientist here at NASA Goddard. I work for the Sun-Earth Education Forum.

This is a group that is charged with educating the public, students, and teachers about the wonders of the sun and the earth and how the sun-earth system affects the earth in your daily lives.

The sun-earth connection education forums impact millions of people every year. One of them is Sun-Earth day which will celebrate the total solar eclipse on March 29.

Another is the student observation network which gets real-time science mission data into the hands of students. In the future the Sun-Education forum will doing things like celebrating the 2007 International Heliospheric Year and developing new technologies such as pod casting to help students enhance the way they do science.

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Distance Learning

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I'm Dr. Marci DeLani and I'm a scientist here at Goddard Space Flight Center. I work in education with the NASA Explorer Program and Goddard's Digital Learning Network.

Goddard Education sends representatives out to take NASA education out to the classroom, but we also bring education in by connecting the classrooms to Goddard and NASA Scientists through the Digital Learning Network.

The NASA Explorer Schools Program and the Digital Learning Network encourages students to work harder in the math, science, and engineering and provides them with the opportunity to work with math and science outside of their classrooms.

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The NFB Partnership

+ VIew Movie | MPG | 12.5MB | 00:01:14 Time

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Hi, my name is Nancy Maynard. I'm here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center at the Cryospheric Sciences Branch.

We have a wonderful initiative here at Goddard Space Flight Center together with the National Federation of the blind, working with blind youth to inspire and empower blind students to consider careers in science, technology, and math.

Over the past few years, students have participated in summer science camps in which they have learned electronics, rocketry; they have built their own payloads, launched their own rockets, and collected science data.

In addition, Goddard science has sponsored the production of several books in Braille, tactile materials, and large print. NASA's Earth and Space science are also enabling blind students to explore the universe and beyond as never before.

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International Polar Year

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My name's Waheed Abdaladi. I am head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch here at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where we study the ice cover in the Earth's System. Now the ice in the Earth's system is a critical element in that system, because it helps control the climate and influences sea level, and is one of the most sensitive aspects of the Earth that changes in climate

Here at Goddard we pay particular attention to what's happening to the sea ice cover, the snow cover, and the ice sheets and glaciers in the Earth, and they are all changing quite significantly and in very different ways. The ice sheets are shrinking at the edges and apparently growing at the interior, and this has significant implications for sea level change as they contain the equivalent of about 220 to 230 of sea level. The sea ice is also shrinking, at least in the arctic, and actually in parts of the Antarctic, it seems to be growing. And this is critical because the sea ice controls the amount of energy and moisture that's exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean, thus effecting ocean circulations, atmospheric circulation, and the Earth's balance of energy.

Snow cover is a critical resource.

It's the water storage we need in the spring to support the growth of vegetation and to replenish reservoirs that are drained through the summers and our ability to observe these from space has really provided new insights into how all of these systems work and the role in the Earth system. This research has important implications now and in the future, and particularly in the coming years. We've, seen just recently that the ice has been changing dramatically and in 2007 the International Polar Year will begin when the world will be paying extra attention to the polar regions and the changes in ice cover.

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