International Space Station
Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students
What Is EarthKAM?
An educational outreach program sponsored by NASA that allows
students around the world to take pictures of Earth from a digital camera
aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and learn about our planet
from the unique perspective of space.
History of EarthKAM
• Initiated by Dr. Sally Ride in 1995 as KidSat
• Kidsat camera flew on 3 shuttle flights
• Program renamed EarthKAM in 1998
•EarthKAM camera flew on 2 more shuttle flights
•Became a permanent payload on the ISS in 2001
• Program Statistics
• Completed 40 missions on ISS
• Engaged schools from over 50 countries
• Engaged hundreds of thousands of students
• Taken over 50,000 images
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EarthKAM Partners
Sally Ride Science
Sally Ride Science is an innovative science content company dedicated to
supporting students’ interest in science. Sally Ride Science manages the
EarthKAM program and is located in San Diego, CA.
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
The EarthKAM Mission Operations Center (MOC) is located at UCSD. With
guidance from the EarthKAM advisors, UCSD undergraduate students and
staff maintain the MOC year-round and support the EarthKAM missions.
NASA – Johnson Space Center (JSC)
All EarthKAM image requests are routed through JSC’s Mission Control
Center and then uplinked to the ISS. JSC is located in Houston, TX.
NASA- Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
JPL supports EarthKAM image processing and the EarthKAM image archive.
JPL is located in Pasadena, CA.
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EarthKAM Mission Operations Center (MOC)
• Approximately 20 – 25 UCSD undergraduate students staff the MOC each quarter
• During an EarthKAM Mission, the MOC processes the photo requests from all
participating schools
• UCSD undergraduates and ISS EarthKAM staff provide year round online support
to educators via EarthKAM website
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Getting Started with EarthKAM
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Register at www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu
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www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu/register
What happens after you register?
Receive registration confirmation email from ekhelp@earthkam.ucsd.edu with Teacher Login
information and Mission Login information.
Use your Teacher Login to view and edit your
account information, sign up for upcoming
missions, view and sort your codewords and view
your mission sign-up history.
Use your Mission Login to participate in an
EarthKAM mission and submit requests for
images to the ISS EarthKAM camera.
During an EarthKAM Mission
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One of the astronauts on board the ISS mounts the EarthKAM camera in
a window that looks directly down at Earth.
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The camera is hooked up to a laptop that receives the photo requests
sent in by the participating schools and processed by the UCSD MOC
An EarthKAM Mission
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A 4-day window of opportunity to request Earth images (typically
Tuesday – Friday)
Missions scheduled approximately once per quarter (4 times per year)
Students use ISS EarthKAM mission web pages to make photo
request and to view images taken.
Students identify image opportunities by examining the ground track of the ISS
projected over a map of the Earth.
www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu/help
EarthKAM Missions in 2013
• Winter 2013: Jan. 29 – Feb. 2
• Spring 2013: April 23 – April 27*
• Summer 2013: July 9 – July 13*
• Fall 2013: Oct. 22 – Oct. 26*
* Subject to change
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How Educators Use EarthKAM in Classrooms
•Earth Science
•Land formations, plate tectonics, weather
•Environmental Science
•Climate change, human impact, natural disasters
•Space Science
•NASA and ISS, gravity, low-earth orbits
•Geography
•Latitude and longitude, maps
•Math
•Image scale, resolution
•Technology
•Web-interface, data transmission to/from Earth to ISS
•Language Arts
•Images as art, social studies of image location
EarthKAM Resources
Images from current and past missions are available year-around in the Gallery.
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www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu
ek-help@earthkam.ucsd.edu
Thank you!