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December 11, 2003

Release 03-XXX

NASA SELECTS EDUCATORS TO BRING ASTRONOMY DOWN TO EARTH

NASA has selected 14 highly skilled educators from across the United States for admission into the agency's Structure and Evolution of the Universe (SEU) Educator Ambassador Program. The educators will work alongside NASA program and mission specialists to investigate the most exotic forms of energy and matter in the Universe.

The NASA SEU Educator Ambassador program, led by Professor Lynn Cominsky and Dr. Philip Plait at the Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif., Education and Public Outreach Group, is now starting its third year. The NASA SEU Educator Ambassador Program has now expanded to include a total of 23 highly qualified teachers that will be helping to develop educational material for grades 6-12 based on the science behind several different NASA missions and programs. Many of the SEU Educator Ambassadors have won state and national awards including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

The SEU Educator Ambassadors will test the material in their classrooms and then disseminate it to other teachers across the continent through workshops at the state, regional, and national levels. The NASA missions and programs that support the SEU Educator Ambassadors are all funded by NASA's Structure and Evolution of the Universe (SEU) theme area. SEU seeks to explore and understand the dynamic transformations of energy in the Universe---the entire web of biological and physical interactions that determine the evolution of our cosmic habitat. The SEU Educator Ambassadors will directly inspire a new generation of explorers, scientists, and engineers.

"This is a great way to teach kids and their teachers about fascinating topics in high-energy and gravitational wave astronomy," says Cominsky. "It's a perfect marriage between the scientists and engineers who are designing, building and doing research with NASA satellites, and professional educators who are best suited to getting the information to the students and to other teachers."

Training for the teachers includes a ten-day intensive seminar at Sonoma State and Stanford Universities to immerse the educators in high-energy and gravitational wave astronomy.

"The workshop will be tough, but fun," says Plait. "We'll be talking about a lot of things in which most people are interested: huge black holes, warps in space time, exploding stars and vast explosions that can fry a whole planet. Kids love this kind of stuff, and it's this type of science that is done in the SEU theme."

During the program, SEU Educator Ambassadors will work closely with the scientists involved with several NASA missions and programs, including the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST); the Swift mission, which will observe gamma-ray bursts; XMM-Newton, a joint NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) observatory; the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a another joint NASA/ESA observatory; the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which will map the history of star birth in the Milky Way, Astro-E2, a joint mission between Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and NASA; and NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC).

The 14 new educators chosen as SEU Educator Ambassadors are:

Jeffrey Adkins, Deer Valley High School in Antioch, Calif.; Dr. Tom Arnold, State College High School in State College, Pa.; David Beier, Lee's Summit R-7 School District in greater Kansas City, Miss.; Deanna Duncan, the School for Environmental Studies in Concord, N.C.; Mandy Frantti, Munising Public Schools in Munising, Mich.; Walter Glogowski, Ridgewood High School, in Norridge, Ill.; Bruce Hemp, Fort Defiance High School in Fort Defiance, Va.; Ellen Holmes, Fairmount Elementary School, Bangor, Maine; Erich Landstrom, Boynton Beach Community High School, in Boynton Beach, Fla.; Janet Moore, the Challenger Learning Center of Central Illinois, in Bloomington, Ill.; Cheryl Niemala, Cascade Christian Schools, Puyallup, Wash.; A. Marie Pool, Clinton High School in Clinton, Okla.; Linda Smith, Paulsboro School District, in Paulsboro, N.J.; Pamela Whiffen, Palo Verde Middle School in Phoenix, Ariz.

For more information about the NASA SEU Educator Ambassador program, visit:

http://epo.sonoma.edu/ambassadors

For information about other NASA education programs on the Internet, visit:

http://education.nasa.gov

For information about NASA on the Internet, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov