Live from the Hubble Space Telescope

Want to observe Neptune, Pluto, and Jupiter with the world's premier optical telescope -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST)?

You can on March 14th and April 23rd. On these dates, "Passport to Knowledge," an educational Internet site, will broadcast never-before-seen HST observations of the three planets from 1:00-2:00 p.m. EST. Students from across the U.S. and Europe will actively participate and interact with professional astronomers. The broadcast will be shown on participating PBS stations and NASA-TV.

The selection of Neptune, Pluto, and Jupiter was made with student input:

• Neptune came in first because its dark and bright clouds come and go, and there is a good chance that students might be the first to see a new Great Dark Spot.
  
  
• Pluto interested the students because it is the smallest and least explored of the planets. It is faint, icy cold, and very distant, with a moon that is half as big as Pluto itself.
  
  
• Jupiter was chosen because it's the largest of the planets, has interesting cloud patterns, and is currently under intense scrutiny by NASA's Galileo mission.

Passport to Knowledge is an educational project funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and PBS.

More Cool Stuff

Check out the "Live from the HST" homepage:

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/livefrom/hst.html

Learn about the Passport to Knowledge Project and earlier "live" broadcasts:

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/livefrom/passport.html

Want to know more about the HST, see pictures taken with it, etc.? Go to the Public Outreach Site of the Space Telescope Science Institute:

http://www.stsci.edu/public.html

Learn more about the Galileo Mission to Jupiter by clicking on our Observation of the Week of November 29, 1995 -- "Plunge into Jupiter's Atmosphere":

http://observe.ivv.nasa.gov/observe/ootd/prev/1995/ob951129.html

If you want to learn more about Neptune, Pluto, Jupiter, and the other planets, check out the following sites at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and University of Arizona:

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/planets

http://bang.lanl.gov/solarsys

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/tnp

Check out the homepages of NASA, NSF, and PBS:

http://www.nasa.gov

http://www.nsf.gov

http://www.pbs.org

Check out other observations in the Observation of the Week Archive.