By Kevin Torres, INSPIRE Grad
As long as I can remember my curiosity has driven me. Five years ago while searching for an opportunity beyond the standards of education I came across the INSPIRE program. Without understanding the true potential, I registered and soon became inspired in space. The Interdisciplinary National Science Project Incorporating Research and Education Experience (INSPIRE) brought a significant change in perspective to my way of life with the Online Learning Community (OLC) and the Summer STEM Experience (SEE) all together in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In addition it motivated me to go beyond the ordinary.
INSPIRE had just started out, its purpose was to motivate students to study a STEM related field. It was all coming together for me now, the year before I started experimenting with rockets and now this program offered me an insight look to all things related with NASA. On the Online Learning Community (OLC) students from all over the nation could share their experiences and ideas. In the OLC we also competed during the year for a chance to an internship. So what we had learned in the OLC through the year we put it to work on the summers.
The SSE was the crown jewel of the program. Students were competing for an opportunity to attend a NASA center in the summer. In 2009 I was chosen to participate in the SSE-Explorer Experience, all expenses paid. The experience consisted in going to the Kennedy Space Center for a VIP tour. I had just finished my ninth grade. The experience was out of this world especially for the young boy that I was. Seen firsthand what everyone sees usually in the movies, I had been exposed to a universe of undefined possibilities. At that moment I could see myself in the future working for NASA.
INSPIRE, OLC and the SSE had taken a significant value in my life. It gave me the opportunity to have hands on experiences about what I would like to study, engineering. It exposed me to a professional environment unmatched by anyone. For me being an engineer is not just about looking for solutions to society’s problems, but also leaving something for the future. By doing so it is not just a more efficient way of life, but in overall it improves our quality of life.
In essence to all high school students and INSPIRE students, no matter how much you read, you learn and you study nothing is as important as the imagination that sparks that motivation. That’s what keeps you reading, that’s what keeps you learning and most importantly that’s what keeps you studying beyond the requirements. Remember INSPIRE students what keeps the wheel turning is the momentum you build.
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
LiveChat Roundup 3/15/13
By Jim Gerard, INSPIRE Education Specialist, KSC, FL
One thing we like to do in the OLC is highlight our students work. Last night's LiveChat featured 10 students who completed the "Trace Space Back to You" activity (this activity is found under the January tab on the Discover page). Students were asked to prepare a short PowerPoint featuring five examples of Spinoffs, NASA technology that has been adapted to the commercial marketplace. For the LiveChat, each student had two of their selected Spinoffs, and many of the students were at the chat to tell us about their slides via microphone or text. The students and their Spinoffs were:
Casey Takahashi (Present)
Next week we'll hear about the Simulated Lunar Operations (SLOPE) Lab at the Glenn Research Center from researcher Michael Disanti. Be there at 8pm CT, or come early for the fun in the INSPIRE Cafe beginning at 6pm CT!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
One thing we like to do in the OLC is highlight our students work. Last night's LiveChat featured 10 students who completed the "Trace Space Back to You" activity (this activity is found under the January tab on the Discover page). Students were asked to prepare a short PowerPoint featuring five examples of Spinoffs, NASA technology that has been adapted to the commercial marketplace. For the LiveChat, each student had two of their selected Spinoffs, and many of the students were at the chat to tell us about their slides via microphone or text. The students and their Spinoffs were:
Casey Takahashi (Present)
- Water Purification
- Cordless Tools
- LEDs
- In-ear Thermometer
- Battery Charging Algorithm
- Ingestible Thermometer Pill
- Insulation
- Smoke Detectors
- Memory Foam
- Blood Pump
- Baby Food
- Helmets
- Radial Tires
- Plant Growth chamber
- Freeze-Dried Food
- Invisible Braces
- CAT Scans and MRI Imaging
- Weather Information Processing
- Joysticks
- Miniature Computer Chips
Next week we'll hear about the Simulated Lunar Operations (SLOPE) Lab at the Glenn Research Center from researcher Michael Disanti. Be there at 8pm CT, or come early for the fun in the INSPIRE Cafe beginning at 6pm CT!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
A Scientific Treasure Hunt
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By Olivia Humes, INSPIRE Grad
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A quasicrystal is an arrangement
that is periodic, but never repeats itself. Traditionally, scientists believed
that these types of crystals were impossible. The thought was that only shapes
that tessellate, or fit well together, such as triangles or squares, could have
the same symmetries as crystals. But in the 1970’s and 80’s, two dimensional
quasicrystals were discovered, such as the Penrose Tiling shown on the right,
and created artificially in the laboratory. These arrangements had five-fold
symmetry, which was thought to be an impossible configuration for a crystal.
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
-->
“What I’m about to tell you is a fairy tale,” Paul
Steinhardt began from the front of the crowded lecture hall on January 22nd,
2013. “Like any good fairy tale, it involves the impossible.” The audience, who had gathered in anticipation in one of
the largest lecture halls at the University of Washington expecting a talk on
quasicrystals wondered what might happen next. Steinhardt’s lecture title, Once Upon a Time in Kamchatka, had
already intrigued me. Over the next hour, Steinhardt weaved a spellbinding true
story of mystery, magic, and science.
A quasicrystal is an arrangement
that is periodic, but never repeats itself. Traditionally, scientists believed
that these types of crystals were impossible. The thought was that only shapes
that tessellate, or fit well together, such as triangles or squares, could have
the same symmetries as crystals. But in the 1970’s and 80’s, two dimensional
quasicrystals were discovered, such as the Penrose Tiling shown on the right,
and created artificially in the laboratory. These arrangements had five-fold
symmetry, which was thought to be an impossible configuration for a crystal.
But
Steinhardt wasn’t satisfied with knowing that quasicrystals were possible. He
wanted to find them in nature. And this simple idea resulted in years of
scientific investigation and detective work. After finding a sample in a museum
that appeared to be a quasicrystal, he launched an investigation, searching for
the origin of the mysterious mineral that contained it. When multiple lines of
investigation converged in a remote area of eastern Russia, “beyond Siberia,”
as Steinhardt recalled, he decided to gather a team of geologists, chemists,
wilderness experts, and graduate students in order to hunt down a sample of the
elusive mineral.
And find it
he did, discovering that the sample originated from a meteorite that had formed
during the early stages of the solar system’s development, and could possibly
one of the most abundant substances in the solar system.
But the
most fascinating thing I learned at this lecture was how exciting science can
be. Recounting his tale, Steinhardt’s excitement was infectious. His story
sounded as if it could be the plot of a bestseller or blockbuster. It showed me
how much hard work goes into getting an idea from inception to action, from
evidence to confirmation. Steinhardt’s “fairy tale” was a lesson to all who
heard it that night that science is not simply about waiting passively for a discovery
to pass over a lab bench, but an active, hands-on search for knowledge led by
those not afraid to get dirty in search for the minutest of details.
Kite-and-Dart Tiling image from http://www.itap.physik.uni-stuttgart.de/~gaehler/tilings/kitedart.gif
Read more about quasicrystals, Paul Steinhardt, and his
discoveries here:
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Building Robots for Fun
By Melody Liu, INSPIRE Grad, MIT, MA
Hi, my name is Melody! I’m a freshman at MIT, and I hope you guys are having a lovely winter! I’m going to talk specifically about one of the best parts about MIT, the Independent Activities Period (IAP). Every January, students flock back to MIT after winter break, eager to spend time in Cambridge without the full semester’s workload. It’s a unique time when students can explore Boston, hang out with friends, read that book we were too busy to read before, and work on awesome side projects. And how do STEM students relax from schoolwork? By taking fun courses ranging from truffle-making, glass-blowing, bicycle engineering, programming competitions or learning a new language. All in a month!
I decide to take MASLAB (Mobile Autonomous Systems Lab), a robotics competition where Teams of four people build a robot to pick up balls and throw them over a wall. Sounds cool, right? Having never done anything robotics related, that didn’t seem all that hard. But little did I know…
The first day, after a brief lecture explaining rules and programming strategies, we’re deposited in the lab, along with a box of raw materials, and are told to build a robot by 8 PM. Knowing little about how an arduino works or how we would even wire all the circuits together, I felt as if we’d just been dropped in a swimming pool and asked to teach ourselves to swim. But we buckle down, split up the tasks, pester the Teaching Assistants (TAs) and manage to get a moving robot 20 minutes before the deadline. That sense of learning something in such little time is exhilarating. In the course of a week, we had a working robot that could recognize balls, move towards them and pick them up, though that effort required us to work 10 AM to 8 PM daily.
Though the competition hasn’t ended yet (our final competition is next Friday), I know that I’ve learned so much – the frightening kind of learning that comes from plunging head first into an activity. Though I’ve gotten so much out of this experience, I have to remember that the first few days before the competition started, I was terrified. I didn’t know anything about robotics, I was only a freshman and I asked myself countless times why I didn’t choose to do something that I could actually do, a safe class about astronomy or truffle making or learning Python, where I could go relax each day and cook with friends. If I had let those apprehensive fears get to me, I would likely have dropped out. But instead, I knew I had to learn to get out of my comfort zone, which is, admittedly, one of the scariest things to do. This meant that while other teams zoomed through assembling their robots, I had to get over my fear of asking TAs questions. And while other teams seemed organized and planned, I pored over countless websites and resources, watching how past teams won. Although experience, dedication, and intelligence can go far, I would challenge you to actively go out of your comfort zone. Because, in the end, knowing what you don’t know, asking questions, and being open to new experiences will get you further in life than any other qualifications. If I had stayed with what was safe, I would have had an immensely enjoyable IAP, full of fun experiences and undoubtedly learning a lot. But then, I wouldn’t have found out the pleasure of machining your own robot custom part, the experience of designing things in CAD (model of our robot, below!), or the excitement of watching our robot pick up its first ball. Every moment that we allow ourselves to expand our horizons, we see a bit more of the big picture, letting us put our experiences in perspective.
If you want to follow the competition, here are a few sites.
MASLAB Site, explaining rules: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/site/index.html
MASLAB Wiki for this year: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/wiki/Maslab_2013
We’re team 12, and we’re required to keep a journal of what we do each day. Wish us luck!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Hi, my name is Melody! I’m a freshman at MIT, and I hope you guys are having a lovely winter! I’m going to talk specifically about one of the best parts about MIT, the Independent Activities Period (IAP). Every January, students flock back to MIT after winter break, eager to spend time in Cambridge without the full semester’s workload. It’s a unique time when students can explore Boston, hang out with friends, read that book we were too busy to read before, and work on awesome side projects. And how do STEM students relax from schoolwork? By taking fun courses ranging from truffle-making, glass-blowing, bicycle engineering, programming competitions or learning a new language. All in a month!
I decide to take MASLAB (Mobile Autonomous Systems Lab), a robotics competition where Teams of four people build a robot to pick up balls and throw them over a wall. Sounds cool, right? Having never done anything robotics related, that didn’t seem all that hard. But little did I know…
The first day, after a brief lecture explaining rules and programming strategies, we’re deposited in the lab, along with a box of raw materials, and are told to build a robot by 8 PM. Knowing little about how an arduino works or how we would even wire all the circuits together, I felt as if we’d just been dropped in a swimming pool and asked to teach ourselves to swim. But we buckle down, split up the tasks, pester the Teaching Assistants (TAs) and manage to get a moving robot 20 minutes before the deadline. That sense of learning something in such little time is exhilarating. In the course of a week, we had a working robot that could recognize balls, move towards them and pick them up, though that effort required us to work 10 AM to 8 PM daily.
Though the competition hasn’t ended yet (our final competition is next Friday), I know that I’ve learned so much – the frightening kind of learning that comes from plunging head first into an activity. Though I’ve gotten so much out of this experience, I have to remember that the first few days before the competition started, I was terrified. I didn’t know anything about robotics, I was only a freshman and I asked myself countless times why I didn’t choose to do something that I could actually do, a safe class about astronomy or truffle making or learning Python, where I could go relax each day and cook with friends. If I had let those apprehensive fears get to me, I would likely have dropped out. But instead, I knew I had to learn to get out of my comfort zone, which is, admittedly, one of the scariest things to do. This meant that while other teams zoomed through assembling their robots, I had to get over my fear of asking TAs questions. And while other teams seemed organized and planned, I pored over countless websites and resources, watching how past teams won. Although experience, dedication, and intelligence can go far, I would challenge you to actively go out of your comfort zone. Because, in the end, knowing what you don’t know, asking questions, and being open to new experiences will get you further in life than any other qualifications. If I had stayed with what was safe, I would have had an immensely enjoyable IAP, full of fun experiences and undoubtedly learning a lot. But then, I wouldn’t have found out the pleasure of machining your own robot custom part, the experience of designing things in CAD (model of our robot, below!), or the excitement of watching our robot pick up its first ball. Every moment that we allow ourselves to expand our horizons, we see a bit more of the big picture, letting us put our experiences in perspective.
If you want to follow the competition, here are a few sites.
MASLAB Site, explaining rules: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/site/index.html
MASLAB Wiki for this year: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/wiki/Maslab_2013
We’re team 12, and we’re required to keep a journal of what we do each day. Wish us luck!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Monday, March 4, 2013
Made in America, Launched in America
By Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator
Today we marked another milestone in our aggressive efforts to make sure American companies are launching resupply missions from U.S. shores. Our NASA-SpaceX team completed another successful berthing of the SpaceX Dragon cargo module to the International Space Station (ISS) following its near flawless launch on the Falcon-9 booster out of Cape Canaveral, Florida Friday morning. Launching rockets is difficult, and while the team faced some technical challenges after Dragon separation from the launch vehicle, they called upon their thorough knowledge of their systems to successfully troubleshoot and fully recover all vehicle capabilities. Dragon is now once again safely berthed to the station.
I was pleased to watch the launch from SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, CA, and I want to congratulate the SpaceX and NASA teams, who are working side by side to ensure America continues to lead the world in space.
A little more than one year after the end of the Space Shuttle Program, our American industry partner, SpaceX, began resupplying the space station with cargo launched from our shores – and they’re on schedule to make at total of 12 resupply missions. Just last week, Orbital Sciences successfully test fired the engines of their Antares rocket, that will power a planned resupply test flight later this year from America’s newest spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia.
Even as commercial cargo launches settle into a regular pattern, we continue to work hard on the Commercial Crew Program and the capability to once again launch our astronauts to space from U.S. soil with American companies. Our three partners - - SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada -- continue to mark milestones toward this capability, and we are confident that within the next few years, we will be reporting a new series of human space launches to low Earth orbit, part of our ongoing efforts to reach farther in space.
Industry's success in developing new space transportation systems is enabling NASA to focus on President Obama's goals of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. We continue to develop the space technologies to make these missions possible even as we marvel at the ingenuity of our commercial partners in taking us to low Earth orbit on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, all of this progress could be jeopardized with the sequestration ordered by law to be signed by the President Friday evening. The sequester could further delay the restarting of human space launches from U.S. soil, push back our next generation space vehicles, hold up development of new space technologies, and jeopardize our space-based, Earth observing capabilities.
In spite of this threat to our progress, however, we must remember that all of our investments in space are creating good jobs here on Earth and helping to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. As SpaceX demonstrated again today, tomorrow's exploration missions are happening right now, and tomorrow's innovators will have many paths from which to choose and many exciting NASA missions of which they can be a part.
To learn more about NASA's commercial space program, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/commercial
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Today we marked another milestone in our aggressive efforts to make sure American companies are launching resupply missions from U.S. shores. Our NASA-SpaceX team completed another successful berthing of the SpaceX Dragon cargo module to the International Space Station (ISS) following its near flawless launch on the Falcon-9 booster out of Cape Canaveral, Florida Friday morning. Launching rockets is difficult, and while the team faced some technical challenges after Dragon separation from the launch vehicle, they called upon their thorough knowledge of their systems to successfully troubleshoot and fully recover all vehicle capabilities. Dragon is now once again safely berthed to the station.
I was pleased to watch the launch from SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, CA, and I want to congratulate the SpaceX and NASA teams, who are working side by side to ensure America continues to lead the world in space.
A little more than one year after the end of the Space Shuttle Program, our American industry partner, SpaceX, began resupplying the space station with cargo launched from our shores – and they’re on schedule to make at total of 12 resupply missions. Just last week, Orbital Sciences successfully test fired the engines of their Antares rocket, that will power a planned resupply test flight later this year from America’s newest spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia.
Even as commercial cargo launches settle into a regular pattern, we continue to work hard on the Commercial Crew Program and the capability to once again launch our astronauts to space from U.S. soil with American companies. Our three partners - - SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada -- continue to mark milestones toward this capability, and we are confident that within the next few years, we will be reporting a new series of human space launches to low Earth orbit, part of our ongoing efforts to reach farther in space.
Industry's success in developing new space transportation systems is enabling NASA to focus on President Obama's goals of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. We continue to develop the space technologies to make these missions possible even as we marvel at the ingenuity of our commercial partners in taking us to low Earth orbit on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, all of this progress could be jeopardized with the sequestration ordered by law to be signed by the President Friday evening. The sequester could further delay the restarting of human space launches from U.S. soil, push back our next generation space vehicles, hold up development of new space technologies, and jeopardize our space-based, Earth observing capabilities.
In spite of this threat to our progress, however, we must remember that all of our investments in space are creating good jobs here on Earth and helping to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. As SpaceX demonstrated again today, tomorrow's exploration missions are happening right now, and tomorrow's innovators will have many paths from which to choose and many exciting NASA missions of which they can be a part.
To learn more about NASA's commercial space program, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/commercial
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Why Wasn't the Russian Meteor Detected Before it Entered the Atmosphere?
By William Cooke, Marshall Space Flight Center, AL
This is the question that keeps cropping up, and it deserves an answer. Images are being posted showing the fragments and they look like ordinary chondrites of asteroidal origin. This material is dark, and not very reflective, which makes it difficult to spot out in outer space, especially if the object is bus or house size.
Astronomers measure brightnesses in magnitudes -- the larger, more positive the number, the fainter the object is. The Sun is magnitude -27, the planet Venus -4, the star Vega 0, and the faintest star you can see is about +6. The best asteroid survey telescopes have a magnitude limit of about +24, which is about 16 million times fainter than what you can see with the unaided eye.
We can now use the latest orbit determined by Dave Clark (and yes, the meteor came roughly from the East, not from the North as stated in the initial NASA reports) and combine it with the estimated size and reflectivity to figure out when we should have seen the meteoroid in the asteroid survey telescopes. The calculations can be displayed in a graph like this one. Note that, even with very large telescopes, the meteoroid would not have been visible until a mere 2 hours (135,000 km from Earth) before impact -- very little time to sound a warning.
Even if we had been looking at the right spot and the right time, there is another problem -- the meteoroid would be in the daylit sky, and telescopes cannot see faint objects in the daytime.
Simply put, the meteoroid was too small for the survey telescopes and came at us out of the Sun.
So how can we tell that the Russian meteor isn't related to asteroid 2012 DA14?
One way is to look at meteor showers -- the Orionids all have similar orbits to their parent comet, Halley. Similarly, the Geminids all move in orbits that closely resemble the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which produced them. So if the Russian meteor was a fragment of 2012 DA14, it would have an orbit very similar to that of the asteroid.
It does not...
If you look at the image, the orbit of the Earth is the green circle. That of 2012 DA14 is the blue ellipse that is almost entirely within the orbit of the Earth; notice that it is close to circular. The other blue ellipse, stretching way beyond the orbit of Mars, is the first determination of the orbit of the Russian meteor. Notice that the two are nothing alike; in fact, they aren't even close.
This is one reason -- a big one -- why NASA says the asteroid 2012 DA14 are not connected.
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
This is the question that keeps cropping up, and it deserves an answer. Images are being posted showing the fragments and they look like ordinary chondrites of asteroidal origin. This material is dark, and not very reflective, which makes it difficult to spot out in outer space, especially if the object is bus or house size.
Astronomers measure brightnesses in magnitudes -- the larger, more positive the number, the fainter the object is. The Sun is magnitude -27, the planet Venus -4, the star Vega 0, and the faintest star you can see is about +6. The best asteroid survey telescopes have a magnitude limit of about +24, which is about 16 million times fainter than what you can see with the unaided eye.
We can now use the latest orbit determined by Dave Clark (and yes, the meteor came roughly from the East, not from the North as stated in the initial NASA reports) and combine it with the estimated size and reflectivity to figure out when we should have seen the meteoroid in the asteroid survey telescopes. The calculations can be displayed in a graph like this one. Note that, even with very large telescopes, the meteoroid would not have been visible until a mere 2 hours (135,000 km from Earth) before impact -- very little time to sound a warning.
Even if we had been looking at the right spot and the right time, there is another problem -- the meteoroid would be in the daylit sky, and telescopes cannot see faint objects in the daytime.
Simply put, the meteoroid was too small for the survey telescopes and came at us out of the Sun.
So how can we tell that the Russian meteor isn't related to asteroid 2012 DA14?
One way is to look at meteor showers -- the Orionids all have similar orbits to their parent comet, Halley. Similarly, the Geminids all move in orbits that closely resemble the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which produced them. So if the Russian meteor was a fragment of 2012 DA14, it would have an orbit very similar to that of the asteroid.
It does not...
If you look at the image, the orbit of the Earth is the green circle. That of 2012 DA14 is the blue ellipse that is almost entirely within the orbit of the Earth; notice that it is close to circular. The other blue ellipse, stretching way beyond the orbit of Mars, is the first determination of the orbit of the Russian meteor. Notice that the two are nothing alike; in fact, they aren't even close.
This is one reason -- a big one -- why NASA says the asteroid 2012 DA14 are not connected.
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Words of Wisdom (Twelve to be Exact)
By Shilpa Chirackel, Freshman at University of California,
Riverside
Good advice for those entering college or university:
- These next four years will determine the next forty years.
- You really do have to study. Skimming through the textbook and hoping for the best will not work anymore.
- To survive college, it is imperative to learn how to manage time.
- Do not procrastinate!
- Do not take 8 am classes. Most likely you won’t attend them. I know I can’t.
- Meet as many people as you can…
- Keep track of important dates such as the last day to withdraw from a class.
- Be yourself.
- Meet with your teachers and/or teacher assistants regularly. Go to their office hours. I promise that they are not scary individuals.
- Do not give into peer pressure.
- Never lose sight of your goals.
- Most importantly, HAVE FUN!
Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12
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