Educating and inspiring students, teachers and the public by communicating the advances in heliophysics science is the primary goal of the HSD Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) staff. Dr. Holly Gilbert, Associate Director for Science, leads the effort to coordinate and advance the most effective methods to reach an array of audiences. All programs and projects are designed to meet or surpass NASA Education Office and SMD E/PO requirements, which include attention to quality, partnerships, focus on customer needs, sustainability, and diversity.
A facilitated HSD E/PO retreat in November 2009 helped determine and focus the direction of the group. Along with E/PO specialists, monthly E/PO meetings are attended by representatives of the GSFC Education and Public Affairs Offices, including the HSD science writer. As a result, communication among these groups—and E/PO staff—has improved considerably, leading to more efficient and effective support for each other in all directions.
Division E/PO staff possess a wide range of talents and depth of experience. With specialists in science, formal and informal education, public outreach, web content and design, social media, graphic design, and many other areas, the staff are well equipped to fulfill their goal. E/PO Leads for STEREO, SOHO, SDO, MMS, Hinode, and ACE, and the entire Sun-Earth Day team are at GSFC, which has provided many opportunities for coordination and leverage. Another key to the team’s success has been the involvement of enthusiastic HSD scientists who have directly interfaced with audiences, verified scientific content, or provided data access or other resources.
Strategic coordination and collaboration within HSD, as well as with other GSFC and NASA programs, universities, and other institutions, expanded the impact and made optimum use of available resources. Interactions both at higher organizational levels and with other Divisions are now routine. Dr. Gilbert is the Division representative to the GSFC PEEC Committee (Public Engagement and Education Communications) and Education Policy Team, and she interfaces with the Science Exploration Directorate E/PO Lead. HSD is represented in Goddard’s Science Communications Working Group, and the E/PO team contributes to telecons and meetings with the SMD Heliophysics E/PO Forum and the GSFC Education Implementation Team. Staff also network with the GSFC Astrophysics Division E/PO team, with a representative at weekly meetings and on monthly Astrophysics E/PO Forum telecons. Pertinent information is regularly shared between the Divisions. This year, HSD E/ PO staff were called upon by ASD to review proposals before submission and to provide materials for ASD E/PO events.
Team coordination and collaboration has resulted in many important accomplishments in the last year beyond those listed in the next section: development of new proposal ideas, teams, and reviews; new connections between scientists and E/PO projects and staff; better distribution of funding to maintain programs and talent; greater knowledge of resources available inside and outside HSD; and clearer understanding of NASA requirements. As a group, we also supported two Goddard-wide events, the Science Jamboree and E/PO Open House.
Programs
Advanced Student Research
Cooperative Education Program, an important educational link between college-level academic study and full-time meaningful work experience through a working agreement between GSFC and several educational institutions. The Graduate Student Researchers Program (GSRP) provides qualified graduate students, in residence at their home institutions, with fellowship support on research projects of mutual interest to the student and the GSFC mentor; in FY2010 HSD supported eight GSRP students. The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) provides talented postdoctoral scientists and engineers with valuable opportunities to engage in ongoing NASA research programs; HSD currently has 14 NPP staff members and several other postdoctoral scientists funded through science grants.
K–12 Education and Public Outreach
Sun-Earth Day (SED) remains the HSD E/PO program with the widest reach, and it covers the range of formal and informal education and outreach activities and resources. SED is a series of programs and events highlighting HSD scientists, missions, and research that occur throughout the year and culminate in a celebration at the spring equinox. This year’s theme was Magnetic Storms. SED reached 650,000 people through direct and indirect participation and another 3.5+ million through the website.
SED produced podcasts, vodcasts, and other multimedia and print resources for use by their audiences internationally, in collaboration with heliophysics
missions and scientists, NASA EDGE, National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and science centers and museums around the world. The program also provided professional development to K-12 educators, museum personnel, amateur astronomers, and community groups. Over 26,000 registered participants used the resources in their own outreach programs. The program also took full advantage of social media networking opportunities to encourage discussions and user feedback, provide instant program updates, and link to related NASA social networks, with over 3,000 Facebook fans and 2,000 Twitter followers.
On March 20, SED hosted a live webcast from the NSTA conference, along with the award-winning NASA EDGE team known for their offbeat, funny, and informative look behind the NASA curtain; speakers included Dr. Gilbert and other heliophysics scientists and E/PO specialists. The webcast alone has since received over a million downloads.
K–12 Education
Visitors to the SpaceMath@NASA website have downloaded over 2 million math problems since the site began, and it currently receives 10,000 visitors monthly. Funded by an EPOESS award, the site is a collection of 375 astronomy and space science problems featuring NASA science discoveries. The program has extensive partnerships with SMD missions who want to increase their mathematics offerings in E/PO. It was recently redesigned to include more multimedia resources, as well as NASA eClips video programs with math extensions. New math problems are added to the site several times each week, often tied to SMD science and engineering press releases. SpaceMath is also producing monthly math problems
for NASA’s Year of the Solar System program. Six new hard-copy math guides, including “Earth Math,” “Space Weather Math,” and “Electromagnetic Math,” were also published this year.
The Space Weather Action Center (SWAC) complements SED and lets students monitor online the progress of a solar storm from the Sun to the Earth. Following a guide, they can quickly access, analyze, and record actual NASA satellite and observatory data to create space weather news reports. Three thousand educators now use SWAC. With support from an EPOESS award, a new Challenger Center “scenario” was developed this year where students react to a simulated solar storm during an Earth, Moon, or Mars mission. The SWAC team trained staff from 20 Challenger Centers on this project, which also provides a post-visit classroom activity.
SDO sponsors formal education programs, including “A Day at Goddard,” a field trip exposing students to a range of NASA career options and the opportunity to meet scientists and engineers. “SDO Ambassador in the Classroom,” a partnership with NASA’s Aerospace Education Services Project, brings a scientist or E/PO staff into the classroom to share SDO-related science lessons. “Think Scientifically” is a series of three books discussing solar science topics at the elementary level. Each was written by a classroom teacher with SDO staff, and illustrated by an interning artist, and includes science, reading, math, and language arts lessons. The books were released this year and are now being pilot tested in 10 classrooms in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
Informal Education
“Family Science Night,” a program for middle school students and their families, is a partnership with the GSFC Astrophysics Division. Evaluation continues to show that participants have a positive change in attitude toward science and can relate what they learn to their everyday lives. On average, 90% of families reported that they conducted science-related activities as a family between workshops and as a result of the program, which is now running in five locations in the northeast.
SDO had a booth at the Association of Science and Technical Centers conference that featured SDO highlight clips on a large plasma screen display and provided information about SDO’s new “kiosk” mode, which allows easy presentation of the previous 48 hours of solar activity at museums.
Public Outreach
The “Space Weather Media Viewer” (SWMV) provides to anyone on the web the same views of the Sun used by scientists to study it. Visitors can zoom in on near-real-time satellite images to see solar activity as it happens. The site also provides images, mission information, video simulations, and scientist interviews. All videos are broadcast-quality and can be downloaded. Recent updates to the Viewer include SDO data and new visualizations and video clips.
SDO E/PO professionals also designed and implemented a comprehensive social media program that includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Blogspot to create a community of mission followers and a feedback mechanism for online SDO E/PO products. A social media plan and style guide, along with a data collection mechanism, was completed this year to develop a
HSD E/PO specialists and scientists reached over a thousand minority students and faculty this year, providing heliophysics educational materials to high school students in weather camps at Howard University, K–12 teachers from the Bureau of Indian Education and at Gallaudet University (partnering with DC Space Grant), teachers of gifted and talented students at Loyola University in Baltimore, tribal college students and faculty members at a summer institute in North Dakota, and Title I students and teachers at the Virginia Air and Space Center. Thanks to support from an EPOESS grant, staff also trained faculty from the City University of New York/Medgar Evers College on SWAC.
Cosmicopia is ACE’s high-school level public cosmic ray and heliospheric science website, which includes over 400 unique “Ask Us” questions and answers. It saw a 30% increase in monthly accesses (now averaging over 500K) and a 25% increase in unique users in the last year.
AstroZone (held at AAS), a.k.a. “Exploration Station” (at AGU), is a science open house designed to share NASA hands-on science activities with local families. The program is a partnership between SDO and the Insight Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Imaging Science. HSD scientists and engineers also supported an outreach booth at this year’s “Maryland Day” at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Public Affairs
In March 2010 HSD welcomed Susan Hendrix as the heliophysics PAO team lead. Susan comes to us with extensive media and public engagement experience. In September 2010 Karen Fox joined HSD as the new science writer/story development lead. She has more than 12 years of freelance writing experience and a strong science background. Other highlights include Apple’s release of a new 3D iPhone App in February, which features STEREO mission data, offering viewers never before seen images of the Sun.
Dr. Gilbert, along with a few other HSD scientists, has made several appearances for national media, including Discovery, National Geographic, and History channels, and local news. GSFC also has the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) producing superior quality images, animations, and data visualizations for a wide range of heliophysics communications and science activities, including press releases, live presentations, print publications, television, and video documentaries.
Notable FY2010 heliophysics stories include:
• “SDO First Light press conference” (4/21/10)
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010500/a010551/index.html
• “NASA’s New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images” (4/21/10)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/first-light.html
• YouTube video released in conjunction with SDO First Light (389,432 views, third most for Goddard EVER)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrmUUcr4HXg
• “Space Weather Turns Into An International Problem” (7/16/10)
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/16jul_ilws/
• “Spacecraft Observes Coronal Mass Ejection” (8/04/10)
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/News080210-cme.html
• “IBEX finds surprising changes at solar boundary” (9/30/10)