Everyone following the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, and especially those participating in Mission 1 to ISS, will go “OH WOW” when looking at this composite photograph capturing ISS flying across the face of the Moon. It was taken on January 4, 2012, from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Mission 1 student flight teams, that’s where your experiments are headed in just 85 days, and the mission patches too!
We hope that all students and teachers that have and are participating in SSEP have a new found connectedness to science, learning, and what we are collectively doing as a species of explorers. In that context, this photo must be all the more impressive.
Some good questions to ask when looking at this photo might be “How far up is the International Space Station? and “How can I get to see it fly over my neighborhood”? I actually wrote a Blog on the Universe post on this during the last Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. I bet you’ll be shocked to learn the distance to … OUTER SPACE (you have to say it with an echo for effect). And the blog post includes links to websites that allow you to track ISS and figure out when you should go outside to watch it streak across your night sky.
PARENT AND TEACHERS – turn this into a lesson in the classroom and a night time family viewing activity! (Get the lawn chairs.) I also invite you to leave a comment below to let everyone know how your viewing went.
Here’s the Blog on the Universe Post: The Business Trip
WHAT?? YOU CAN’T MAKE OUT ISS IN THE PHOTO? CLICK ON THE PHOTO FOR A ZOOM!
For full details on the photograph, go to Universe Today
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