Students and teachers will once again have the opportunity to control a camera aboard the International Space Station and peer down on the planet below. The Sally Ride EarthKAM will run from Oct. 22 – 25, and students and teachers are encouraged to register for the mission.
EarthKAM allows students and teachers to explore Earth from the unique perspective of space. During three to five EarthKAM missions each year, students can control a digital camera aboard the space station to capture images of almost any place on Earth. These images are downloaded from the space station to EarthKAM and are then available on the Web for viewing and sharing by participating classrooms.
Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students was initiated by Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space, in 1995 as KidSat. After flying as a camera payload aboard several space shuttle missions, the program was renamed ISS EarthKAM. The camera system was placed aboard the space station as a permanent science education payload during Expedition 1 in 2001.
The ISS EarthKAM Mission Operations Center, located at the University of California, San Diego, is modeled after NASA’s Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center, and staffed by undergraduate students to support four missions annually.
The San Diego mission team targets, requests, and retrieves images from the International Space Station and communicates with NASA’s Mission Control for all EarthKAM activities.
Physicist, author and advocate for education, Ride was selected for NASA’s astronaut corps in 1978 and flew twice as a Mission Specialist aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983 and 1984. Later, she served as CEO of Sally Ride Science, the company she founded to advance classroom education in science and engineering.
For more information about EarthKAM and to register for the upcoming mission, visit the Sally Ride Science EarthKAM home page.
