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| Check out this fantastic photo of Mauritania |
The Charlotte Central School 6th graders in Tasha Grey's class are applying their learning about world geography and coordinate grids by participating in a NASA program called the Sally Ride Earthkam (www.earthkam.org).
Twice each year astronauts on board the International Space Station install a special camera in one of their earth observing windows and students are able to upload requests to take high resolution pictures of the earth below. In order to successfully "take" a photo, students have to identify the latitude and longitude of a site that is located along the orbital path of the ISS, and then identify the exact second that the ISS will be over that specific location. We also learn a bit about weather and cloud patterns, as it can be really frustrating to identify a great picture only to discover it's buried under a thick layer of clouds in a low pressure system.
Our challenge for students this year is to take a picture of a common landform such as shorelines, mountains, rivers, etc. on each of the six continents that fall under the ISS orbit. We expect to take more than 300 pictures during the mission, and as a summary will create a school display that will let other students practice their own skills trying to match the picture and its latitude/longitude coordinates to locations on a large earth map.
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This is 44N 73W from 250 miles up
(aka Swanton, VT)
The coast of Namibia
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