NASA Calls for Students to Learn the Sun during Solar Week

Are you wishing for build a pinhole camera to glance at an eclipse? Or study more about how huge telescopes examine the sun? The place to go on the Web is solarweek.org from October 18-22. Twice a year, Solar Week makes a weeklong series of web-based educational activities for classrooms about our magnetic variable star, the sun, and its interactions with Earth and the solar system.

Each day of Solar Week provides a different set of lessons and games for students ranging from the upper elementary to high school level. The site covers everything from solar emission to pursuing careers in science. For example, on Monday, after learning details about how the sun is a star just like the other ones in the sky, students can play a game to decide just where the sun lies in the Milky Way. Or on Thursday, they measure how quick a coronal mass ejection races from the sun.

Helping to answer the students’ questions on an online bulletin board will be three scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. who have been occupied almost since the project began in 2000. Throughout the week, Heliophysics researchers Terry Kucera, Dawn Myers, and Holly Gilbert will be among some twenty scientists who will share their excitement about the dynamic star at the center of our solar system. “I consider it’s great that the kids get direct interaction with the scientists,” says solar physicist Kucera, who is involved with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory.