NASA, Call Me Maybe?

Here's a weird question for you, what do Carly Rae Jepson and NASA have in common? Well, click the YouTube video below to figure it out. Some quirky folks compiled video and images from the NASA Curiosity Rover mission and made themselves a little parody video. It was also a catchy way to get my students thinking about how we study space. 

After more discussion about telescopes and satellites, we started talking one of NASA's current missions, "Curiosity". They were floored when I informed them that it had just landed back in August. To get a better look at the Rover, we spent some time playing on this incredible "Explore Mars!" web application. Click here to check it out for yourself. In a nutshell, students could drive the rover around Mars, check out the crater in which it landed, and read about various tasks the Curiosity is working on.

Call Me, Maybe? NASA photo. 

I only have 6 student computers in my classroom, so we had to do a little sharing. While one set of students were on the computer, I was explaining a fun writing assignment to the others. Using images taken from Curiosity of Mars found here, the students were to write a postcard BACK to Earth from Curiosity. I let the students click through the gallery and select which image they wanted to write about. Here are a few of my favorite images from the gallery. 

Small Debris.

Wheel Scuff.

Exploring Mars was AWESOME today, but we did run into a few hiccups. The application was running very slow on our student computers so some students didn't get the full experience. I hope to pull up the application again so we can try it out another afternoon when we have some free time. 

For the next couple of days we'll be talking about our Solar System.

Happy Monday!