by Atoosa Savarnejad
They went into orbit, they talked to Mission Control, and they examined moon rocks. The lucky group of Escondido School fourth-graders didn't even have to leave Earth to take their virtual trip into outer space in "The Encounter," a hands-on program at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
NASA hopes that some of the thousands of schoolchildren who have "encountered" the exhibit may actually go into aeronautics as a career and could take the country's space program into new dimensions.
NASA scientists, led by engineer Cy Sivertson, have turned a 6-foot-by-6-foot supersonic wind tunnel into a dynamic "Encounter" with outer space designed for children in fourth, fifth and sixth grades.
About 20,000 students from schools around the Bay Area and as far away as Arizona have visited the Encounter since it opened in 1991.
On one recent morning, 28 precocious students from Kristin Sevier's fourth-grade class at Escondido Elementary School in Palo Alto visited the facility.
Students were divided into four groups and stopped at four "stations." At the aeronautics station, they learned about aspects of flight using wind tunnels and computers. They saw a model wind tunnel, with a working fan at one end and a model airplane on a metal rod. Then they asked questions.
"How do you know an airplane can fly when it's on the rod?" asked fourth-grader Peter Kortenhoven.
"Because there are transducers inside the aircraft that measure liftoff," said volunteer docent Al Marston.
"Oh," said Peter.
At the space sciences station, the children learned about the physics of space travel. They sat in the Orbital Chair, which looks more like a seesaw than a chair, except that instead of teetering, the two people sit on the ends and go around in a circle. As if that isn't difficult enough, while they're spinning, they throw a ball to each other. The idea is to demonstrate the difficulty of launching a satellite into space to photograph an orbiting planet. There was no shortage of children who wanted to try the chair.
Next they tried the Angular Momentum Machine, a spinning device where students speed up or slow down by bending in or out.
At the Space Station, the children were led into a simulated rocket ship and were assigned different jobs, such as engineers, earth observation specialists, medical specialists, life science specialists and tethered satellite specialists.
Peter was assigned to be the communications specialist and relayed results of Space Station experiments to Earth. That was his favorite part of the trip. "I like the Space Station because I got to talk to Mission Control," he said.
In the next station, Mission Control, Peter put on a white coat and examined "moon rocks" in a vacuum. The "moon rocks" are common earth rocks of basalt, pumice and granite. Other students became communications specialists, earth observation specialists and remote sensing specialists.
At the end, all of the students talked about what they liked best.
"I liked the thing about the dog and the feather," said Robert Garcia, referring to a demonstration where in a vacuum, two objects such as a feather and a plastic toy dog fall to Earth at the same time.
"I liked it. I learned a lot of stuff," said his classmate, Faviola Mendoza.
The Aerospace Encounter is free to school visitors and operates on an annual budget of $300,000, said Tom Clausen, NASA Ames education officer.
"This is a test base for new curriculum and even virtual reality," Clausen said. "In addition to having the kids in Encounter, we are also developing and testing ideas we want to use in the classroom on the kids."
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