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Educational outreach activities

The larger space Agencies often make some space experimental facilities available through their ‘Education Project Outreach Activities’. These are currently accessed either directly by schools or through a university, and mostly used for extra-curricular purposes. Spacelink will liaise with the Agencies to ensure its activities remain complementary to the Agencies’ own activities. By arrangement, Spacelink may occasionally, where relevant, incorporate selected non-curricular activities from Agencies into its Club Programmes.
 
One of the most innovative of the current outreach projects relates to micro-gravity experiments. This is managed by the Italian “University Among the Stars’, and provides opportunities for selected schools/students to design and conduct their own experiments in the micro-gravity environment of space. These payloads are carried on Space Shuttle missions and plans are in hand for similar experiments to be conducted in the International Space Station.
 
Another facility is the NASA Students’ Cloud Observations On –Line (S’COOL) project, in which students aged 9-18 years co-ordinate their observations within 5 minutes (or at most 15 minutes) of the satellite’s overpass. Their observations are an integral part of the research being done by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) team at NASA.