Students use Sally Ride EarthKAM on ISS to take snapshots around the globe

The Sally Ride EarthKAM is a camera set up on the International Space Station (ISS) to image the surface of the earth through a station window. What images the camera captures is controlled by students at middle schools in many different countries.

Last week, astronauts on the ISS installed and activated the camera: ISS Daily Summary Report – 3/30/2017 | ISS On-Orbit Status Report –

Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle Schools (EarthKAM): This morning the crew successfully installed and activated the EarthKAM payload in the Node 2 nadir hatch window. Science operations using the EarthKAM setup will begin next week, marking the beginning of the 57th EarthKAM mission.

This session includes over 200 schools in more than 50 countries around the world and is scheduled to last through April 9. This is a NASA education program that enables thousands of students to photograph and examine Earth from a space crew’s perspective.

Using the Internet, the students control a special digital camera mounted on-board the ISS. This enables them to photograph the Earth’s coastlines, mountain ranges and other geographic items of interest from the unique vantage point of space.

The team at Sally Ride EarthKAM then posts these photographs on the Internet for the public and participating classrooms around the world to view.

Check out the image gallery for the latest Mission. Some samples:

Myanmar, Asia - EarthKam - March 30, 2017
Myanmar, Asia – EarthKam – March 30, 2017

 

Coast of South Africa – EarthKam – March 30, 2017

 

A view of the coast of India. March30, 2017

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The Space Show this week – Apr.3.2017

The guests and topics of discussion on The Space Show this week:

1. Monday, April 3, 2017: 2-3:30 pm PDT (5-6:30 pm EDT, 4-5:30 pm CDT): No live show today due to Space Foundation Symposium. See website newsletter for Golden Oldie suggestions.

2. Tuesday, April 4, 2017: 7-8:30 pm PDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT, 9-10:30 pm CDT: No live show today due to Space Foundation Symposium. See website newsletter for Golden Oldie suggestions.

3. Friday, April 7, 2016: 9:30-11 am PDT; (12:30-2 pm EDT; 11:30 am – 1 pm CDT): No live show today due to Space Foundation Symposium. See website newsletter for Golden Oldie suggestions.

4. Sunday, April 9, 2017: 12-1:30 pm PDT (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): Open Lines. First time callers welcome as are all space and STEM topics.

See also:
* The Space Show on Vimeo – webinar videos
* The Space Show’s Blog – summaries of interviews.
* The Space Show Classroom Blog – tutorial programs

The Space Show is a project of the One Giant Leap Foundation.

The Space Show - David Livingston
David Livingston

Video: TMRO Orbit 10.13 – “Suborbital is just the first step”

The latest episode of TMRO.tv is now in the archive: Suborbital is just the first step – Orbit 10.13 – TMRO –

CEO of Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit joins to talk about their plans for suborbital flights, orbital payloads and touches on point to point travel around the planet.

Space news topics:

Falcon 9 SES-10 re-launch and re-landing
Juno flies over Jupiter clouds on fourth science pass
Spacewalkers improvise after fabric shield floats away
Twin solid rockets set for Endeavour display
Europe’s ExoMars Orbiter to begin lowering orbit

TMRO is viewer supported:

TMRO:Space is a crowd funded show. If you like this episode consider contributing to help us to continue to improve. Head over to http://www.patreon.com/tmro for information, goals and reward levels.

Video: “Latest Exoplanet Results from NASA’s Kepler/K2 Mission”

Here’s an update on the latest exoplanet findings by the Kepler space observatory and a preview of the next generation of exoplanet search instruments: Latest Exoplanet Results from NASA’s Kepler/K2 Mission | SETI Institute

The all-sky TESS mission will soon revolutionize our view of planets transiting the nearest, brightest stars to the Sun, just as the four-year survey by NASA’s Kepler mission transformed our understanding of exoplanet demographics. Using the repurposed Kepler spacecraft, the ongoing K2 mission provides a natural transition from Kepler to TESS in terms of sky coverage, survey duration, and intensity of ground-based follow-up observations. For the past three years I have led a large, multi-institutional team to discover, follow up, validate, and characterize hundreds of new candidates and planets using data from K2. I will highlight some of our key results from the first two years of K2 data, and will conclude with a discussion of the path forward to future exoplanet discovery and characterization.