Newtown High School Astronomy Students Go To The Moon

By Jeff White

The computer lab on the second floor of the high school had the hectic fury of mission control last Thursday, November 18.

Students in Russ Weiss’s astronomy class participated in a simulated Lunar Prospector mission as part of a space education program called Moonlink.

The Lunar Prospector spacecraft embarked on its mission to the Moon on January 6, 1998 to conduct a one-year mapping expedition from the lunar orbit. On July 4 of this year, the Lunar Prospector crashed on the surface of the Moon.

Mr Weiss’ students launched their own Lunar Prospector and followed its progress towards the Moon’s orbit, in order to collect data on the Moon’s surface composition, outgassing events, and gravity and magnetic fields, before crashing the spacecraft, just like the real case.

Mr Weiss learned about the program during a science teachers’ conference in Boston last spring. Always open to different things to do with his students, he thought he would use it with his junior astronomy students. “What it does is bring a mock launch into the classroom,” he said during the simulation last week. “Students will analyze the data, write a report and send it to NASA.”

The astronomy class chose a white ray that appears at the bottom of the moon as their site for research. While collecting data, students ran into what Mr Weiss described as an “unexpected” problem, when solar flares from the sun started to interfere with the spacecraft and its information gathering.

Students had to collect their data, plug it into formulas, and determine how they would move their satellite to avoid the radiation they were receiving from the solar flares.

“I think the kids handled themselves well,” said Mr Weiss, considering that the students did not have a chance to perform a “dry run” of the simulation, due to computer maladies that thwarted two attempts at practice.

The ultimate goal, strange as it might sound, was to crash the spacecraft, thus rendering an accurate representation of the real event; Mr Weiss’ students successfully ditched their Lunar Prospector onto the moon’s pot-marked surface.

All students had specific roles to play in the simulation, from the mission director to the gamma ray spectrometer investigator to the public affairs officer.

Although students were excited about successfully completing the mission, most concluded that it was an intense experience.  “It was really nerve wracking,” said Jeanette Buttner, a neutron spectrometer co-investigator.

“I thought it was a good idea,” said Mike Sciaretto, a gamma ray spectrometer co-investigator, about the simulation.

“Being in a real simulation involving NASA and learning everything about NASA was very cool,” concluded Aaron Russo, who was in charge of telemetry and communications. “The room really started sounding like mission control,” added Aaron. “We did good for it being unrehearsed.”

The students did have help, as members of Moonlink were on the phone with them from Wisconsin, walking them through the simulation and watching out should technical difficulties have occurred.

Overall, Mr Weiss said he felt the activity was successful, but he had each member of his class fill out evaluation sheets with their conclusions about the simulation; he wanted to ascertain the value the students placed on such hands-on programs.

Mr Weiss, who has been teaching his astronomy class at the high school since 1972, hopes to do a similar simulation with his seniors and freshmen next year, using a data expedition to Mars as the mission.

The Moonlink program cost $450 to participate in, so Mr Weiss concluded that if he were to do the same or similar simulation again next year, he might have to obtain some grant money.

“It was very representative of NASA when problems occur,” Mike Sciaretto concluded. “A lot of teamwork was involved; everybody had to work together to make sure it was a success,” said Mike Sciaretto.