Sally Ride EarthKAM Mission: Students See World From ISS

A view of the Sally Ride EarthKAM hardware set-up for use in the Lab Window Observation Research Facility (WORF) aboard the International Space Station. 

Image Credit: NASA

NASA is helping students examine their home planet from space without ever leaving the ground, giving them a global perspective by going beyond a map attached to a sphere on a pedestal.

The Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students (Sally Ride EarthKAM) program provides a unique educational opportunity for thousands of students multiple times a year.

EarthKAM is an international award-winning education program, allowing students to photograph and analyze our planet from the perspective of the International Space Station.

A Canadian student from Good Shepherd School in Peace River, Alberta, studies orbital paths of the International Space Station.

Image Credit: NASA

Using the Internet, students control a special digital camera on the orbiting laboratory to photograph Earth's coastlines, mountain ranges and other interesting geographical topography.

The camera has been aboard the orbiting outpost since the first space station expedition began in November 2000 and supports approximately four missions annually.

Schools around the world are lining up to participate in the program, which is growing by leaps and bounds.

The most recent mission, July 15-19, set summertime records, drawing nearly 36,000 students from 562 schools and summer programs in 34 countries across six continents.

Mission organizers believe they may set more participation records when the fall session begins Sept. 29.

EarthKAM officials have scheduled two new sessions that are set to begin in the next few months. Interested teachers or students can still sign up at the EarthKAM website.

"This program will help our students become more scientifically literate," said Annie Bourque, a teacher with Barnstead Elementary School in New Hampshire, one of the hundreds of schools that signed up for the recent summer mission.

"We want them to understand how new technology can help design tools to improve our ability to measure and observe our world. Real, current photographs of the Earth are powerful learning tools, especially when the students have a hand in creating them."

"The goal of the investigation is to cast the net wide and encourage all students to take advantage of this great opportunity from the space station," said Cindy Evans, Ph.D., International Space Station associate program scientist for Earth Observations at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"It is also a great way for future scientists and engineers to explore the many aspects of spaceflight."

The outreach program staff is made up of a group of students attending the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who have been accepted into the EarthKAM Voluntary Internship Program.

They operate as flight controllers, giving them training and inspiration for the next generation of space engineers.

NASA GPM: Contributing to Earth observations from space

The NASA NPOL radar station (left) and D3R Radar station (right) precipitation radars deployed south of Waterloo, Iowa, for the Iowa Flood Studies ground measurement campaign. 

Credit: NASA/Matt Schwaller

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, launched on Feb. 27 from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, will help advance our understanding of Earth's water and energy cycles, improve the forecasting of extreme events that cause natural disasters, and extend current capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to directly benefit society.

The GPM mission will provide unprecedented data on rain and snowfall. The science instruments on the GPM Core Observatory will provide data that will yield the greatest clarity on rain and snow yet gathered from orbiting spacecraft.

With GPM, scientists will gather vast amounts of precipitation data on a global scale. But, how do they know how to interpret the data? How do scientists know the data is correct?

This is where ground validation contributes to the mission. Using instruments that complement and correlate with those on the spacecraft, scientists on the ground gather similar precipitation data.

These data are directly compared with that from satellites to improve the models relying on the satellite data.

Walt Petersen, GPM ground validation scientist from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va., said, "GPM ground validation is a) the process by which we identify uncertainties in satellite-based precipitation products compared to ground observations"

"b) how we improve satellite-based methods of estimating precipitation by better understanding precipitation physics."

"c) how this physics relates to what the instruments 'see,' and d) assess the utility of GPM products in monitoring the global water cycle, flood and weather prediction, and e) al this adds to and aids our understanding of climate change."

This is an artist's depiction of NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission's Core Observatory. 

Credit: NASA

The GPM program uses remote campaigns and a Precipitation Science Research Facility at Wallops to supplement and correlate the data gathered by Earth-orbiting satellites.

"Ground validation is central to understanding the quality of GPM precipitation products, how the products can be improved, and evaluating the utility of the measurements in a variety of earth system science applications," Petersen said.

The remote campaigns, using instrumented aircraft and ground-based instruments, allow scientists to monitor precipitation under a variety of conditions and geographic regions.

Petersen said, "The Wallops Precipitation Research Facility collects multi-frequency dual-polarimetric radar observations of precipitation rates, types, sizes and shapes through the depth of the troposphere."

"We collect high quality, concentrated rain gauge network measurements of area-mean rainfall, and use networks of imaging instrumentation to observe the number and distributions of the size, shape and type of precipitation particles falling to ground."

"Collectively, these measurements enable us to describe precipitation physical properties over scales ranging from that of an individual rain drop or snowflake to that of the Delmarva and Chesapeake Bay regions."

With ground validation, scientist will be able to gauge the quality of Earth observations from space using GPM and improve combined space- and ground-based data products used to understand global precipitation.