International Space Station Expedition 12 Science Operations Status Report for the Week Ending October 14, 2005

Expedition 12 Commander and NASA Science Officer Bill McArthur began his stay on board the International Space Station setting up cameras for a session of the Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students, or EarthKAM experiment. This NASA education program enables students to photograph and examine Earth from a space crew’s perspective. A total of 116 schools from across the United States and seven international schools participated. In total 9,214 students were directly involved in this session during which 1,667 photos were taken. Using the Internet, the students control a special digital camera mounted on the space station. This enables them to photograph the Earth’s coastlines, mountain ranges and other geographic items of interest from the unique vantage point of space. The team at EarthKAM then posts these photographs on the Internet for the public and participating classrooms around the world to view.

NASA’s payload operations team at the Marshall Center coordinates U.S. science activities on Space Station.