Right now, scientists are pounding out a plan for what could be the path to explore the solar system for the next 10 years. For the past year, scientists from across the country have been meeting, gathering data and creating a priority list for missions to other planets. They will present their findings of the Solar System Exploration Survey to NASA in May. In the past, NASA has decided its own priorities for planetary missions. However, in January 2001, NASA’s associate administrator for space science Ed Weiler requested the National Academies undertake a survey. All of the major meetings have ended. “The academy is famous for not leaking things,” Weiler said.
March 21st, 2002
Builder renovates Mars lab Arizona Business Gazette
A building firmly planted in the past and future of Arizona State University has been updated by a local contractor. Scottsdale-based Linthicum Contractors spent $1.7 million and 8
March 16th, 2002
Boys & Girls Club wins award The Mountain Press
The Pigeon Forge Boys & Girls Club was recently distinguished as having the best program in the world for clubs with a budget under $200,000. “That’s a pretty high honor,” said Elizabeth Robinson, director of the club during the time it won, from October 2000 through October 2001. Robinson is now director at the Sevierville branch. “We have 31,000 Boys & Girls Clubs across the world,” she said. Whether shooting hoops or planning a mission to Mars, the club strived for program excellence in every activity, Robinson said. The Mission to Mars program was run in cooperation with NASA’s National Education Endowment. The idea was for kids to decide which 100 members of the community would be selected to go to Mars if the Earth became inhabitable. The kids asked, “what type of people would be important to bring,” Robinson said.
March 15th, 2002
Sally Ride Aims to Launch American Girls on to High-Tech Careers
The first American woman to fly in space is aiming to launch a new generation of American girls on to careers in math, science, engineering and high technology. And judging from those who attended a recent Sally Ride Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., young girls across the nation are anxious to target futures in fields traditionally dominated by American men. Chatting with Ride after a space shuttle mission simulation, girls from six states wanted to know what it was like to launch into space, float weightless in zero gravity and look back on the blue orb Earth. And Katie Satre, an 11-year-old from Randolph, Vt., made Ride an offer the former NASA astronaut and president of SPACE.com could not refuse. “My dream is to be the first person on Mars, so when you come with me on my spaceship to Mars, I get to be the first one out. Okay?”
March 11th, 2002
Students Get the Best from JPL
Ray Garcia had to stay after school, but not to clean blackboards. Garcia is an engineer at JPL who returned to his grade school, Albion Elementary in Los Angeles, 44 years after he left, to involve students in a balloon rocketry experiment. The December 2001 visit was part of a collaboration between JPL and the Los Angeles Unified School District
March 10th, 2002
Space-Themed Virtual-Reality Ride Suggested for KSC Visitor Complex
Imagine whizzing through the darkness at Disney World’s Space Mountain, or plunging off a virtual skyscraper at Universal Studios’ The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman. Now combine those sensations with the rumble of blast-off, the pressure of rising G-forces as you soar into space, the excitement of crashing through a terrifying meteor shower, or launching a satellite, and the thrill of roaring safely back to Earth. That’s the kind of virtual-reality experience many people want from the next big attraction at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, according to a recent informal readers poll by FLORIDA TODAY, the local daily newspaper for Florida’s Space Coast.
March 8th, 2002
Mission to Mars UANews.org
University of Arizona scientists are sending instruments to Mars. A group of local students, however, is going there next weekend. Well, at least in spirit, anyway. The students, from the eight middle schools (grades 6-8) in Tucson’s Sunnyside School District, will mesh astronomy with science fiction writing at an overnight workshop at the Tucson Challenger Learning Center.
March 5th, 2002
Students Advance To Finals In The 2002 University of Illinois
University of Illinois students are embarking on a NASA Mars mission, the 2002
March 5th, 2002
National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest to Be Held in April at Purdue University Purdue News
The countdown is on for the Purdue “Mission to Mars” team as it prepares for its new mission: defending the university’s national title on Saturday, April 6, in the 14th annual Theta Tau Fraternity’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Shawn S. Jordan, a senior majoring in computer engineering from Fort Wayne, Indiana, said he and his Purdue Society of Professional Engineers’ teammates drew inspiration from trips to science museums and watching the Learning Channel to come up with their theme. Their “Mission to Mars” machine hoisted the U.S. flag over a simulated mini-Martian landscape to the strains of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and Lenny Kravitz’s rocker “Fly Away” to win the local competition at Purdue on Saturday, February 9.
February 22nd, 2002
Canada sets sights on Mars Toronto Sun
Canada’s scientists and engineers have the right stuff to go it alone to the red planet, a conference heard yesterday. Last May, former astronaut and Canadian Space Agency president Dr. Marc Garneau vowed to have a Canuck-led mission to Mars off the ground by decade’s end. At Ontario’s Centre for Research in Earth and Space Technology, conference delegates heard that areas where Canada excels — robotics, geology and drilling — make the ingredients for an all-Canuck mission to Mars.