So Long, Sally

THERE GOES MY HERO: Today, Sally Kristen Ride, the first American woman in space, slipped the surly bonds of Earth. She was 61. 

I remember her first flight in 1983, the year I graduated from high school, well. (Then, as I do now, I can't help but wonder, what the HELL took so long when it came to getting an American woman in space. But I digress.) Ride was the perfect person for the pioneering mission. A physicist, she was wicked smart but never showy - and always a consummate professional.

More recently, I have resourced Sally Ride Science several times for educational resources for CeeJ and Bee (and me!). Founded in 2001, Sally Ride Science promotes and supports children's interest in science, math and technology, with the goal of inspiring students to think about their futures in school and beyond.

Here's a short (2 minutes) video about Sally by NASA. She talks about her historic spaceflight.

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Though Ride (1951-2012) is gone, her legend and her inspiration will live on in perpetuity. 

1st photo of US by NASA satellite, Landsat 1 (Earth Resources Technology Satellite) launched 40 years ago today

I started the day by dropping in on a birthday party for a satellite program on NASA TV. Being celebrated was the 40-year old Landsat program, a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the United States Geological Service.  The first 


Landsat satellite launched in 1972, and forty years ago today, Landsat began transmitting images of Earth from space back to Earth. A record of the recent history of our planet. The data returned is used by researchers, commercial endeavours, the government, environmental management, and people who like pretty pictures (Earth as Art). 


The presser covered the Top 10 stories in Earth's recent history as seen by Landsat. One example was Mt. St Helens before and after its 1983 eruption. 


Here's St. Helens in 1973, not long after the Landsat program was launched.

And here it is in 1983, just after its massive explosion.

Fast forward to 2000, and you can see how the land around the volcano's crater has become forested again. 

Other dramatic Landsat images shown included Beijing's massive growth over the past 40 years, the  Amazon deforestation, images of the 650 oil wells set fire by Hussein's troops in Kuwait, the Mexico Guatemala border (with complete clear cutting on the Mexico side, and a lush forest on the Guatemalan side), the global sea level rise, Yellowstone fires, and more. 


You can read about and see the top 10 here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/landsat/news/landsat-40th-top10.html

WEBINAR: Just after the LANDSAT presser ended, it was time to tune into a NASA NEON Webinar. This one was kind of a grab bag of info about NASA and space-y stuff. Here are some of the gems I gleaned in the hour.

1) There's a Web site featuring how NASA projects/programs/missions/etc. affect your everyday life. It's called the NASA Spinoff site: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/   And if you visit NASA @ Home and City, there's a cool interactive feature where you can learn about how "space exists in your environment."  http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/nasacity/index2.htm  It's neat-o, check it out!

Webinar host Sonya Williams also pointed us in the direction of GloVis, or the United States Geological Service's Global Visualization Viewer: http://glovis.usgs.gov/  The site has an image-based search and order tool that can be used to review the land remote sensing data inventories held at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS). I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet, but it looks like a powerful resource.

One factoid Williams shared is that at NASA Goddard in Maryland, there are more scientists at one location than at any other spot on world. There are between 9,000 and 10,000 people working there, the majority being scientists or engineers, the majority of whom are working on  earth sciences-related projects. 
We also touched on NASA's Voyager mission. There are great images and video from the mission here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/imagesvideo/index.html  and if you check out this link -
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html - you can find out where the space probes are right this second. 

THE SOUND OF SILENCE: The campus is quiet today. Have I mentioned the students have flown the coop? They're camping until Thursday. In their absence, I'm getting my geek on - scanning, editing, cropping and correcting hundreds of archival photos. That, and I have some shiny new software - Photoshop Premiere Elements 10, a video editing program. I am feeling saucy because I have used it to successfully extract, save and make portable snippets of video from a large master file. Go me!