>>Maria Zuber:
Okay.
These are my -- these are my two spacecraft.
They're orbiting the moon right now.
These two spacecraft, they're about the size
of a dishwasher or I like to say an apartment-sized
washer and dryer.
And they were this spring mapping the moon
at an altitude of 55-kilometers and flying
in precise formation and were measuring the
distance between the two -- how the distance
is changing down to about a 10th of a micron
per second so that we can measure the moon's
gravity field with great precision.
This fall we've taken the spacecraft altitude
down so that the altitudes above the lunar
surface are approaching the height that commercial
airplanes fly above the surface of the earth,
and it's very challenging to keep these two
spacecraft in orbit.
But we're learning a lot about the interior
of the moon.
We're studying the early evolution of planets
and what this tells us actually about the
period of time that life developed on earth,
and actually we hope to improve parameters
in fundamental physics.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about
today.
For a long time I said to myself that if I
ever got the opportunity to lead a mission
that I was going to take as many young people
as I could along with me for the ride.
Okay?
And so I'm going to talk about the education
aspect of this mission.
It's called MoonKAM and this is a camera experiment
that we have on the spacecraft, which is the
first imaging experiment on a NASA mission
that has no scientific requirement.
It is completely dedicated to education and
outreach.
And this is actually work that I did in collaboration
with Sally Ride, America's first woman in
space.
Sally has dedicated her career since retiring
from the astronaut program to educational
matters, and this is the last major project
that she worked on until she passed away in
July.
And Sally and I wanted -- we decided that
ownership was going to be very important.
Other NASA imaging experiments have taken
some pictures that have allowed students to
take some pictures, a handful there, but very
few because of the fact that this instrumentation
was due to science.
We wanted cameras that were going to be owned
by students.
So the problem with that, it's an opportunity,
of course, but the challenge is that spacecraft
instrumentation is very expensive, so we had
to find a way to do this in an inexpensive
way so that it would be affordable.
And so that camera up there, those are rocket
cams.
They are the cameras that we strap on to the
sides of rockets so that when a rocket takes
off and the stages separate that you see the
video of the stages separating.
And what we were able to do is put one electronics
box and four cameras on each one of the spacecraft
that were all oriented in different directions
so that we wouldn't have moving parts, which
allowed us to simplify the operations as well
as minimize mechanisms, which is also another
challenge in space flight.
Okay.
If I could have the next slide, please.
So the idea here is that ownership is empowering.
So since we've done this experiment I've had
a number of adults send me emails saying,
"Well, we'd like to take a picture of the
moon.
Could you take this for us?"
And I say, "They're not my cameras.
You need to get in touch with a student who
is in the program."
We've targeted this at middle school students
because middle school is the period of time
when students have to decide whether or not
they're going to take the hard math that puts
them on the AP track in high school that allows
them to measure -- to major in science and
engineering in college.
And we decided that a student, if engaged
and excited about an idea, would do vast amounts
of work to figure out how to target images
on the lunar surface.
We have a program that gets downloaded to
their high school where they have to figure
out where the spacecraft are going to be flying
over at a given time.
They target their images and they get uploaded
to the spacecraft.
And this is a picture here of a classroom,
but it's not an exactly correct picture, I
would say, because it shows the teacher helping
the student.
Overwhelmingly, the case is that the students
teach the teachers how to use the software
that we've given them.
And in this program last spring we have 100,000
images of the moon that have been taken by
students in 3,000 participating classrooms
across the country.
So the reach of this experiment has been considerable.
Okay.
So I'm going to show a little bit.
So we have four cameras on each spacecraft,
two of which point down, one of which points
forward, one of which points backward.
They have different resolutions, and I'm just
going to show you a couple of examples of
things that middle school students, primarily
middle school, are learning about the moon.
Okay.
So the first is students have been looking
at what the effect of viewing geometry of
features on the surface.
So what you see there is a picture of a feature
called Reiner Gamma, which is a magnetic structure,
and students have targeted that at different
viewing angles.
It's actually a swirl on the lunar surface
that has very high magnetics associated with
it, and the students are trying to understand
whether or not there's something in the geology
which is telling us the nature of why there's
very high magnetization.
Students are studying illumination conditions.
So here's two different pictures of the same
crater taken under different lighting angles
where the students are trying to understand
how the position -- where the position of
the sun is, the moon and the spacecraft, and
how this allows one to highlight different
features in the -- of the features on the
surface.
The students are going in and studying regional
geology, so this is -- the feature on the
left is of Sinus Iridum, which is a part of
the moon, Oceanus Procellarum, which is about
10:00 on the clock if you view the full moon.
And Feature C, that's the rim of a large impact
basin.
And A, that whole area has been flooded by
lava, and the students are doing geologic
reconstructions of these areas.
So the right-hand side is a valley that's
associated with faulting on the surface.
Here's pictures that the students have taken
of the Apollo landing site, Taurus-Littrow,
and you might be able to see there that the
students have actually gone through and reconstructed
the traverses that the Apollo astronauts made
on the surface of the moon.
And the last -- the last things I'll show,
this has lead to things beyond the lesson
plan in terms of engineering.
So this is -- we did a student expo.
I rented the Reagan Rotunda in Washington,
D.C. and invited elected -- officials and
heads of societies to come in and view the
work that the students were doing.
And this young seventh grade young man here
got interested in the gravity part of the
experiment, went on to the NASA planetary
data system, downloaded an old lunar gravity
model and wrote a program to do an spherical
harmonic expansion and plot the gravity field.
And he asked me when I was going to get him
a better gravity field.
[ Laughter ]
>>Maria Zuber: And finally we have a tool
that allows students who take images from
different areas to put them in Google Moon,
which is actually a module of Google Earth,
and find out what students in different classrooms
have been studying.
And so students who are studying an image
in a particular area can get into communication
with students who are acting and working in
different areas, and compare notes in trying
to do their geological studies.
So in summary here, we talk a lot about educational
standards.
And if you look at what the educational standards
say that students should learn about the moon
in middle school, it doesn't go much beyond
the moon goes through phases and this tells
us that the moon revolves around the earth,
but I think with this presentation I hope
I've told you that there is so much more that
is possible and that with a judicious investment
and some creativity that we can actually use
space exploration as a real tool for educational
advancement.
