NASA Official: Adam Szabo
Curators: Robert Candey,
Alex Young, Tamara Kovalick
NASA Privacy, Security, Notices
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The GGS Project and its investigator groups have been rapidly expanding their public outreach and educational activities. Coordination of these activities has fallen within the SPOF whose staff has been especially instrumental in collecting the data products and information needed to prepare the material used for public relations and outreach activities. The World Wide Web is used as a primary information tool to learn about ISTP-GGS outreach activities. The Project developed and maintains the extensive "Exploration of the Magnetosphere" non-mathematical introduction to space science, as well as a questions and answers service, called "Ask Dr. Geospace," for general public inquiries about space science. Links to education and outreach projects at investigator sites are also available from the ISTP web pages. Also within the SPOF, a graphic artist produces illustrations and cartoons for multiple uses by both the Project and Investigators. Very recently, an experienced, well known science writer has been brought in to develop material for the media, interface between GGS scientists and Goddard public affairs personnel, and initiate and coordinate the outreach and education activities of the Program. The Project is currently collaborating with the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore in the development of a large, permanent, interactive display on Sun-Earth Connections, with the possibility of duplicating the display for other sites.
The press conference held in January on the magnetic cloud event of January 6-11, resulted in unprecedented media attention, including front page articles in the Washington Post, USA Today, and Baltimore Sun, with additional articles in 30 papers in 8 countries and journals, such as Science News, Discovery, Science and Aviation Week & Space Technology. Dan Rather on CBS News carried the story, as well as National Public Radio in two time slots. Numerous web-based news and science publications also featured the story. The CME event of April 7-11, 1997, has also generated a remarkable amount of media attention, nearly saturating the 40 largest markets, proving again that the public has surprising interest in Sun-Earth connection events. Unique observations of comet Hale-Bopp by the three imagers on POLAR provided material for a press release reporting the co-discovery of a third comet tail composed of (neutral) sodium atoms. A press conference to be held at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union at the end of May will release the latest and rather remarkable results on the detection of icy comets by POLAR, a tantalizing and controversial subject that originated from the images taken by the global auroral imager on Dynamics Explorer 1. While comet observations are not the primary scientific purpose of the GGS program, they bring significant attention to the program and give credit to the capabilities and value of the program to NASA and the public. Individually, the ISTP-GGS investigator groups have been pursuing outreach activities with local schools and other educational facilities. Work experience programs for high school students have been established and Space Physics Education Outreach grants have been obtained from NASA. These grants are used to develop course material which also appears on the web. The investigator teams have shown excellent cooperation in the development of products for media events, including imaging movies and audio files of wideband plasma wave data. We expect this area of public outreach to expand significantly during SOLARMAX. |
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