Mercury Magazine
published by The Astronomical Society of the Pacific
An International Organization
www.astrosociety.org
January/February 2002
Volume 31 No. 1
By Caroline Seydel
Even school children can make a contribution to planetary science. From November 2000 through February 2001, middle and high school students in 13 states observed Jupiter using a radio telescope, and their data were relayed to the Cassini team.
Through a partnership with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the non-profit Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley, California (www.lewiscenter.org), students remotely controlled the 34-meter Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) in southern California. The telescope is part of a group of large radio dishes at the Goldstone tracking station of the Deep Space Network, used by NASA to track interplanetary spacecraft such as Voyager and Galileo.
Craig Campbell, Vice President of the Lewis Center, says he is pleased with the project’s success: “You have children who are extremely disadvantaged, many of whom have barely seen the stars at night. Yet here they’re riding buses across Detroit a four in the morning to operate a radio telescope in California.”
Schools used special software to communicate remotely with the telescope. One student steered the telescope, while classmates watched the dish move via live Internet video. As the radio telescope scanned Jupiter, students recorded radio intensities at different wavelengths. This record of radio emission told Cassini scientists whether the spacecraft observed a typical day or an unusual day.
The students themselves processed and analyzed all the data and they delivered their final report to the Cassini scientists in the spring. Student data were also used to calibrate Cassini’s radiometer. “It’s not the biggest thing that’s going on from NASA’s perspective,” says Campbell. “But the fact that our kids are contributing directly to the mission is really extraordinary as far as we’re concerned.”