Bruce Betts, of the Planetary Society and California State University Dominguez Hills, opens his new 13 week astronomy course with the following video: Intro Astronomy Class 1: Tour of the Solar System – The Planetary Society
Subscribe at csuDHTV – YouTube to get notices when new course videos are posted.
Here’s an announcement from the Stanford Student Space Initiative:
Global Space Balloon Challenge
Ever wanted to build something and send it to space? The Stanford Student Space Initiative and the Michigan Balloon Recovery and Satellite Testbed team invite you to the Global Space Balloon Challenge (GSBC)! The GSBC is an international education outreach project to encourage people from around the world to build and launch their own high altitude balloons- teams from 12 countries from 6 continents have already signed up!
Between April 18 – 21, 2014, teams from all over will launch balloons to the edge of space, recover them, and share the photos and data that they have collected. No prior building experience is required – the project is targeted at new and experienced hobbyists alike – and GSBC organizers will guide you through every step of the process. The goal is to encourage people of all ages to get their hands dirty building their own space hardware, and to promote the spirit of hardware hacking and international STEM collaboration. For more information head to http://www.
I wrote here previously about the Kickstarter campaign to fund development of the game Space Pioneer by Space Enigma Studios. Since then they have posted Updates on the project and they have a new video as well:
Via SpaceX (SpaceX) on Twitter comes a pointer to this rather humbling depiction of our place in the universe:
From the caption:
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/univ…
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is described as follows:
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) was launched in June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in strategic partnership with NanoRacks, LLC. Designed as a model U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative, the program gives typically 300+ students across a participating community the ability to design and propose real microgravity experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS) – America’s newest National Laboratory. SSEP is suitable for students in pre-college grades 5-12, 2-year community colleges, and 4-year colleges and universities. SSEP also affords a participating community a high level of media exposure at a time when STEM education is of national strategic importance.
In 2012, SSEP was extended to international communities through the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education, NCESSE’s new international arm.
SSEP is about immersing and engaging students and their teachers in every facet of real science—on the high frontier—so that students are given the chance to be scientists—and experience science firsthand.
This report includes videos showing ISS astronaut Koichi Wakata starting and stopping SSEP experiments recently delivered to the station : VIDEOS: Astronaut Koichi Wakata Activating SSEP Mission 3b/4 Experiments on ISS – SSEP
These are video records of on-orbit activations, de-activations and other interactions associated with the SSEP Mission 3b and Mission 4 experiments by assigned astronaut Koichi Wakata (Japan). The videos were taken on the two (of six) scheduled SSEP Crew Interaction Days that have thus far taken place since the Cygnus spacecraft berthed at ISS on January 12, 2014, with the SSEP Mission 3b Falcon II and Mission 4 Orion experiment payloads.
Koichi’s activities are reported to all student flight teams via the SSEP Mission 4 and 3b to ISS: Experiments Log page, so that flight teams can mirror all activities in their vital ground truth experiments.
The next scheduled crew interaction with the experiment payloads is to take place on the third scheduled Crew Interaction Day, January 30, 2014 (Crew Interaction Day A+17). You can see the list of all expected January 30 crew interactions on the Experiment Log page.