“I was more than impressed with the student demonstrations and their grasp of lunar science, I was blown away,”said Maria Zuber, principal investigator of the GRAIL mission from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. “The GRAIL mission and MoonKAM are making a difference in young student’s lives one image at a time.”
MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) is the education and public outreach instrument aboard the lunar orbiting GRAIL spacecraft. MoonKAM provides students around the world with an opportunity to identify and choose images of the moon's surface using small cameras aboard the two lunar orbiters of GRAIL – Ebb and Flow. To date, over 80,000 pictures of the lunar surface have been commanded, imaged and received by fifth- to eighth-grade students. The MoonKAM program is led by Sally Ride and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.
“The MoonKAM program brings out students’ natural enthusiasm for science,” said Sally Ride. “Many of these students will be our future scientists and I expect some of them may even visit the craters they photographed.”
The GRAIL mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. NASA's Deep Space Network is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of thesolar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For information about MoonKAM, visit: https://moonkam.ucsd.edu.
For more information about GRAIL, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grail.
