As you may know, I’m a huge NASA fan and am constantly amazed at the great educational opportunities they have available for everyone.  Next week is Earth Science Week, and you can celebrate by hanging out with NASA scientists online.  They’ll host a full slate of social media activities – Twitter Chats, Google Hangout, Reddit, blogs – where students and teachers can connect with some amazing folks.  If you can’t participate in the live event, teachers and students can email questions in advance, and come back to the NASA Earth Science Week after the live event to see if their question made the live event.   Details on each event (including how and where to email questions) is here: http://climate.nasa.gov/eswSite/eswEvents/

Below is the official announcement, if you’d like to read more, or share it with friends, teachers and homeschoolers:

Celebrate Earth Science Week: Connect with NASA Earth Explorers!
Event Dates: Oct. 14-20, 2012

Under the theme “Discovering Careers in the Earth Sciences,” this year’s Earth Science Week will focus on this very topic: the story of the Earth Explorers who contribute to our understanding of the planet. As a leader in Earth science research and applications, NASA plays a key role in this annual celebration. The American Geosciences Institute, or AGI, has organized this event since 1998.

During Oct. 14-20, 2012, students of all ages can connect to an incredible group of NASA Earth Explorers — from scientists and engineers, to multimedia producers, educators and writers. Find out about their careers, why and how they study the planet and what their typical day is like. Blog posts, Google+ Hangouts and Twitter chats, as well as a webinar and radio interview in Spanish, are just some of the media activities that will allow explorers to tell their stories. You can directly participate by asking questions during the live events or by sending in questions beforehand.

The current schedule of Earth Science Week events includes:

– Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1-2 p.m. EDT — Twitter Chat with polar scientist Thorsten Markus
– Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1-2 p.m. EDT — Univisión Radio interview with scientists Erika Podest and Miguel Román (in Spanish)
– Wednesday, Oct. 17, 1-2 p.m. EDT — Google+ Hangout with Operation IceBridge scientist Christy Hansen, on location near Antarctica
– Wednesday, Oct. 17, 4-5 p.m. EDT — Webinar with Aquarius engineers (in Spanish)

– Wednesday, Oct. 17, 6-7 p.m. EDT – Reddit interview with oceanographer Josh Willis

– Thursday, Oct. 18, noon-1 p.m. EDT — Twitter chat with atmospheric research scientist Erica Alston

In addition, on Oct. 18, the many contributions of women at NASA to Earth science will be highlighted as part of Female Geoscientist’s Day. Together with the NASA Earth Science Week website, the Women@NASA blog will feature three remarkable Earth Explorers.

Visit the 2012 NASA Earth Science Week website (http://climate.nasa.gov/esw2012) for a collection of articles, event information, blog posts, videos and other educational resources in English and Spanish.

Visit the Women@NASA Blog page: http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/newui/blog/viewpostlist.jsp?blogname=womenatnasa.

I love that filmmaker Brad Canning thanks NASA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL,) Mars and “Our Curiosity.” It’s a great reminder that without the public funding of science, there would be no man on the moon, no International Space Station, and no video of this amazing feat. Our nation’s boldness to go where no one has gone before is one of the things that makes us great.

I stayed up until after midnight watching NASA TV’s coverage of Curiosity’s landing on the red planet.  It was absolutely amazing and I hope kids everywhere will be inspired to study about space, planets and science in general.  If you haven’t visited NASA.gov, you’re missing out on an amazing array of NASA websites dedicated to space and our very own Earth.

NASA image from Mars landing spot taken by Curiosity rover

Here’s the Mars Science Laboratory website, if you want to follow Curiosity’s mission!

My son came home from school the other day joking about a zombie apocalypse. Before that, it was the Mayan apocalypse.  And now, he keeps hearing about all these “freaky” solar storms.  He laughs, but I’m sure his 11-year-old imagination leaves plenty of room for worry.

I can’t kill the zombies lurking in his subconscience, but I can put his mind (and my own) at ease about the solar storms with this short NASA video that explains that we’re in a totally normal sun cycle and are protected by Earth’s atmosphere

My sound experiment post will have to wait, because the video NASA is posting from the space shuttle Endeavour is too cool not to share! The video above is from day 2 of the mission as STS-134′s crew travels to the International Space Station.

The astronauts are hard at work, and one of the first things you’ll see is Astronaut Mark Kelly shaking up some plastic cylinders to start a microbiology experiment!!! At the NASA tweetup, we got to see one of these culture tubes close up!

The tube has three compartments: bacteria, liquid food for bacteria, and tiny worms called nematodes that the bacteria can infect! First, they mix the bacteria with the food, then they mix the bacteria with the worms. In space, the bacteria get really “infectious”and “virulent”, and researchers on back earth study them and use the information to make better vaccines to keep people healthy.
Have you ever heard of Salmonella bacteria that can be in eggs and make people sick? This is one of the bacteria they’re studying!

Today, NASA posted this great video of Endeavour “doing a final backflip before docking with the space station.”

Twenty kids stopped eating donuts long enough to shout out a countdown this morning in my living room. We gasped as Endeavour’s rockets blossomed, smiled at the crackle and roar and cheered as she ascended, rolled gracefully and disappeared into the clouds with a flash of orange. We watched in awe as the side booster rockets blew off and the shuttle floated free of the external tank with the curve of the earth in the background. I have to admit that I got a little misty- not because I wasn’t standing at the countdown clock to experience it live, but because despite the laws of physics and all the safety precautions, it still seems like a miracle each time we send people safely into orbit.

When NASA scientists wanted to study star dust (particles from comets and interstellar dust), they had to find a way to slow down the tiny pieces of matter as they flew through space.  By the way, interstellar means “between stars.”  NASA’s Stardust spacecraft would encounter star dust traveling 6 times the speed of a rifle bullet!  At these speeds, a collision with most materials would shatter, or burn up the space dust they were trying to collect.

In order to solve this problem, the scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California crafted a special “space jello” called Aerogel which could slow space particle down and trap them, undamaged, for study. Aerogel is similar to glass, but is 1000 times less dense.  In fact Aerogel is 99.8 percent empty space.  Imagine a box of air filled with tiny, tiny glass threads. When space dust hits this jello-like substance, it makes a tiny tunnel in the aerogel that helps scientists find and collect the dust under a powerful microscope.  Then they can study the dust to see what it is made of!

I was luckily enough to get a sample of Aerogel from Stephanie Smith, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Aerogel looks like light-blue smoke when you hold it in your hand. It is as light as a feather, but it feels solid, dry, and harder than jello when you touch it!  You can read more about Aerogel and the Stardust missions by clicking here, on the JPL website!  It’s amazing science.  They’ve found many interesting elements and chemical compounds in the star dust already.  I can’t wait to see what they find next!

Here’s a video of us playing with the Aerogel Stephanie brought to the NASATweetup! (courtesy of  MindspaceLTD)

A recent trip to Kennedy Space Center made me feel like a kid again and I’m reveling in a momentary lapse of cynicism. Please excuse me if I sound cheesy, or over the top, but I haven’t come back down to earth quite yet.

The United States is is a young nation.  We have not been afraid to explore, and our boldness led us to take humankind’s first steps on the moon.

Naturally, our curiosity has led us to some dead ends and we’ve taken a few tumbles, but through basic scientific exploration and hard work we have stumbled upon a wealth of information that has made each of our lives better.

Even while being robbed of our innocence, our country has managed to hold strong to the ideals of freedom and equality.  Sadly, our childlike wonder has not been so lucky and is in danger of becoming a casualty of the aging process.  Gravity pulls us down each time we cut funding to scientific research.  It doesn’t hurt much yet, but could bring us to our knees.

At Kennedy Space Center the last week of April, I attended  a “tweetup” sponsored by NASA for 150 of it’s Twitter followers. There to witness the launch of space shuttle Endeavour, we were given behind-the-scenes tours at NASA and listened to a number of astronauts, scientists, engineers, and technicians speak about working for the space program. Their passion and conviction for what they do was the most patriotic expression I’ve ever witnessed.  The message I heard over and over again was the mantra of the American dream.

“Work hard in school and you can be whatever you want to be.” (Maybe even an astronaut.)

“The best stuff is still in front of us.”

“When we stop exploring we will falter.”

NASA is not about astronauts sitting around eating freeze-dried ice cream.  It is about exploration and science.  It is about “revealing the unknown about the planet on which we live” and learning about our place in the universe. The astronauts on the space station are conducting experiments which will yield better vaccines and cancer treatments, among other things.  They’re gleaning priceless information about our home planet that we simply can’t capture with our feet on the ground.

Of course it is important for us to be fiscally responsible as a nation, but we can’t lose our childlike wonder or we will lose what sets us apart from the rest of the world.  We will fail to thrive when we fail to explore and make new discoveries. NASA embodies the American spirit of exploration and symbolizes what makes us so great as a nation.

As NASA’s chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said, there is a “brilliant future ahead that is ours for the creating.”

We waved and screamed as the Astrovan (carrying the astronaut crew to the shuttle Endeavour) drove past our NASA Tweetup group yesterday.  Moments later, our hearts fell when we witnessed the first-ever Astrovan turn-around as the launch was “scrubbed”, or delayed, and the astronauts headed back to quarantine to wait for the next launch attempt. Putting on brave smiles, we trudged back to our tent.  Everyone was sad, but one thing we learned at the tweetup is that NASA always puts safety first, and for good reason.

@Astro_Flow (Leland Melvin) being interviewed by Levar Burton

I was thrilled to get my first question from a student named Ian yesterday! He asked how the space shuttle Endeavour got her name.

When NASA invited students to name the new shuttle they were building, over 70,000 kids replied to the challenge. You can read more about the contest on NASA’s website, but here’s why Endeavour was the winning name:

“Endeavour was the most popular entry, accounting for almost one-third of the state-level winners. The Endeavour was a ship belonging to the British Royal Navy. In their entries, students focused on the vessel’s first voyage under the command of seaman and scientist James Cook in 1769-71. Cook steered Endeavour to Tahiti in the South Pacific to observe and record the rare event of the transit of Venus, a celestial event that allows observers on Earth to see Venus passing across the face of the sun.

Students drew parallels between astronomy on Cook’s Endeavour and on the space shuttle; the payloads of medicine, science and commerce that were on both the ship and shuttles; and the make-up of the crews, both of which included scientists.” www.nasa.gov

A great name, don’t you agree?