New NASA Projects Offer Suborbital Opportunities for Education

Students and educators nationwide will have the opportunity to interact with NASA engineers and scientists through two newly developed NASA flight initiatives. The programs, developed at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, are designed to give students and educators hands-on flight experiences using NASA sounding rockets and scientific balloons.

The Wallops Rocket Academy for Teachers and Students, or WRATS, provides high school teachers with a technical flight experience to reinforce science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts. Teachers and students will participate virtually in authentic, hands-on experiences based on NASA’s sounding rocket engineering and science data collection. WRATS will include interactive Web-based data to give students and educators lessons in physics and engineering. Teachers also receive resources to integrate the data into classroom lessons.

Participating teachers have already been selected for this year’s WRATS project and will attend a rocketry flight week June 19-24, 2011, at Wallops. Participants will learn about the dynamics of launch, safe flight operations and view a NASA Terrier-Orion sounding rocket liftoff on June 23, 2011.

The Wallops Balloon Experience for Education, or WBEE, provides opportunities for high school teachers to fly experiments on scientific balloons. WBEE will build upon an existing partnership between NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium, which has developed student outreach programs, including the High Altitude Space Platform and Louisiana Aerospace Catalyst Experiences for Students, or LaACES. Since 2002, the programs have flown multiple missions involving hundreds of students in undergraduate though post-graduate programs. WBEE will expand the LaACES platform into secondary education with a focus on core principles and future partnership with educators and their institutions.

Teams of educators have already been selected for this year’s WBEE project. They will visit the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, for a week-long workshop in July. Participants will be involved in classroom and hands-on balloon science activities. The teams will have the opportunity to build and test their own science payload for a flight to the edge of space under the direction of NASA and Louisiana Space Consortium personnel.

The WBEE experience culminates with the launch of these payloads aboard a NASA scientific balloon. WBEE will be an intensive course involving an authentic learning experience educators may implement at their home schools.

The Teaching From Space office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston is partnering with Wallops to provide the flights. The program continues NASA’s investment in the nation’s education programs by supporting the goal of attracting and retaining students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines critical to future space exploration.

To learn more about these new opportunities, find education resources to use in the classroom, and find out how you can apply for future WRATS and WBEE opportunities, visit http://education.wff.nasa.gov/.

For information about NASA’s Teaching From Space program, visit www.nasa.gov/education/tfs.