INQUIRY-BASED EDUCATION: EXAMPLES FROM TWO NASA MISSIONS

NASA has supported the creation of Education and Public Outreach programs that support National Science and Math Education standards and goals. The Deep Impact mission that will send a 350-kg impactor spacecraft to excavate a crater in Comet Tempel 1 is the subject of a module entitled, “Designing Craters”. Students design experiments that they can conduct in their school and "advise" the Principal Investigator how best to meet the science objectives of the Deep Impact mission, which is to excavate a crater that is approximately 100 m wide by 25 m deep. The students design the experiment, carry it out, measure crater size vs. multiple parameters, plot the relationships and draw conclusions about which parameters are significant and which are not. There is teacher lead discussion of the differences between laboratory studies and hypervelocity crater formation. Their report takes the form of a letter drafted to the mission’s principal investigator. The material is suitable for high school students.

In NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres, the history and science of the mission is introduced in an educational module. Students research the history of the discovery and study of asteroid 1 Ceres from historical documents and the mission’s web pages. They then recreate the discovery of the asteroid by viewing star fields representing a time span of a few weeks. They find the object that moves with respect to the background stars, having the opportunity to participate in the process of discovery. The material is suitable for middle school students.

All materials are tied to education standards. They are reviewed, pilot and field-tested in schools around the country as part of the evaluation process. Extensive effort is made to train teachers in the use of the materials using teacher networks. We are also adapting these education modules to community and after school programs for use in informal education settings. Material on the project web sites relates to the modules.