Nation's Science Museums -- Wired

Acronyms are defined below.

^{Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)}

Wouldn't it be great to visit science museums around the US without leaving your home? Now you can.

A NASA-funded project links science museums via the Internet and enables collaboration among scientists, teachers, schools, and museum personnel. The goal is to make satellite-based observations of the earth, the planets, and the universe accessible to students, teachers, and the public. The project -- called Science Information Infrastructure (SII) -- is being managed by the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics (CEA), University of California, Berkeley.

The participating museums are:

Participating teachers develop interactive curriculum materials with help from the museums, the scientists, and feedback from students. The materials include detailed lesson plans, resource grab bags, and activity-building tool kits for the classroom. They are available on the World Wide Web (see URL below).

More Cool Stuff

Go to the homepage of the SII project at the CEA for information about the project, the participating institutions, and access to lesson materials:

http://www.cea.berkeley.edu/~edsci/sii/sii_sii.html

Educators and others who would like to create their own interactive lesson plans for classroom use or public education are invited to use the SII lesson plan template:

http://www.cea.berkeley.edu/Education/lessons/template_summary.html

Images and other educational materials from NASA missions are available from the lesson resource pages of the Science Education Group at CEA:

http://www.cea.berkeley.edu/Education/sol/sol_toolkits.html

The homepages of the participating museums:

Exploratorium

http://www.exploratorium.edu

Lawrence Hall of Science

http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu

National Air and Space Museum

http://www.nasm.edu

New York Hall of Science

http://www.nyhallsci.org

Science Museum of Virginia

http://smv.mus.va.us

Along with the University of California and the museums, two scientific research centers and four industry partners participate in the SII project:

Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

http://www.stsci.edu

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/sao-home.html

Earth Observing Satellite Co. (EOSAT)

http://www.eosat.com/

Pacific Bell CalREN

http://www.PacBell.COM/CalREN

Digital Equipment Corporation

http://www.dec.com

Dun & Bradstreet

http://www.dbisna.com

For information about NASA's LTP projects, NASA's participation in the HPCC program, and the National Coordination Office of the HPCC program, go to the following pages, respectively:

http://iita.ivv.nasa.gov/

http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/hpccm/factsheets.html

http://www.hpcc.gov

The above mosaic of the US was prepared using 16 images from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors on the weather satellites NOAA-8 and NOAA-9. We obtained the image from a site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. To get to the map and accompanying text, go to the following URL, scroll to "Earth Images," and click on "usa.gif" and "usa.txt":

http://bang.lanl.gov/solarsys/raw/earth

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