NESSP in the news

Students from six Idaho schools traveled to the University of Idaho campus Tuesday to try their hand at a simulated moon mission for the chance to win an all-expense paid trip to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The next Buzz Aldrin may be in one of the North Olympic Peninsula’s fifth-through-12th-grade classrooms.

Kids are usually technology savvy, but one group in Kalispell takes that to a new level. RoboScout — Kalispell’s Girl Scout robotics team — has been coding, building and programming robots for years.

The group of middle school girls is preparing for their next competition this summer in Helena. It’s called the Apollo Next Great Leap Student Challenge. It’s sponsored by NASA and commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

A group of home-school students got to see the effects of low air-pressure and radiation after they sent a weather balloon into the stratosphere, with a little help from NASA.

Fifty years after the first Apollo moon landing, students from across the country will get a chance to re-enact the feat with drones and robots, thanks to an educational challenge orchestrated by NASA and the University of Washington’s Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pipeline.

If you could put anything on the moon to represent you and your community, what would you choose?

Students across the country will need to tackle that question, among others, as part of the Apollo Next Giant Leap Student Challenge, a contest commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first human moon landing. Created by a NASA educational program particularly focused on underserved communities, the challenge will ask participating students to land drones near the Apollo 11 landing site on a map of the moon’s landscape, place a payload representing their community to leave behind on the moon and complete science activities.

“A national competition sponsored by NASA and run by a University of Washington educational consortium is aimed at inspiring students to think about science, space travel, and the history of America’s journeys to the moon.”