An Educator’s Workshop for the NEO Surveyor Mission

Astronomy and space science are inherently interesting to students, accessible to teachers, and interdisciplinary in nature. These features make them ideal vehicles for teaching basic scientific concepts in a concrete and interesting manner. In 2025 we will be holding an educator’s workshop run by scientists for the NEO Surveyor Mission. We will draw on the experience from our award-winning workshop “Teachers Touch the Sky”, a hands-on, inquiry-based workshop for educators in grades 4-8 that was originally developed under the NASA IDEAS program.  It was taught annually between 1993 and 2007 and later as part of the outreach and education components of the Cassini, Dawn, and Rosetta projects. 

The purpose of our workshop is threefold: to increase the teachers’ comfort level in bringing physical science – especially experimentation – into the classroom; to increase the teachers’ knowledge of small bodies and physical science in general through lectures by scientists and access to materials; and to empower them to motivate their students to excel in technical subjects. The philosophy of teaching teachers is strongly leveraging even with as few as 25-30 attendees, as the workshop’s participants will reach a total of over 1000 students each year. Of those students who don’t select careers in STEM fields, our hope is that they will become more scientifically literate taxpayers willing to support NASA and scientific research in general.

Small bodies represent especially appropriate subject matter for the general educator audience, as the immediate concerns of planetary defense are compelling and of great interest to the public. In addition, most laypeople have witnessed a comet or meteor and have thus been introduced to the wonder and mystique of these objects. Our workshop’s focus will be on hands-on, inquiry-based activities as they should be implemented in the classroom: The experiments focus on specific mathematical and scientific skills in a concrete manner. They also will introduce teachers to the scientific method, and by extension to their students.  

The plan for the workshop is to include 2 lectures, 3 hands-on activities, and a third lecture that includes a demonstration. The tentative schedule is as follows:

• Lecture on small bodies, including comets, asteroids (with a focus on Near-Earth Objects), and briefly, Kuiper-Belt Objects, mainly in the context of their relationship with other small bodies such as Jupiter Family Comets. The talk will start with an overview of the Solar System and its place in the Universe, as we’ve found from previous workshops that educators benefit greatly from being introduced to fundamental content.
• The classic hands-on cratering activity, which introduces cratering processes, and basic math, graphing, and experimentation skills.
• Lecture on the NEO Surveyor Mission by a Science Team member.
• Kitchen comets: a dry-ice sand model of a comet that will shed volatiles and produce a “tail” during the rest of the day
• Lunch
• A lecture on the electromagnetic spectrum, with focus on infrared radiation, and a demonstration of Herschel’s experiment with a thermometer showing that heat radiation exists beyond the visible portion of the spectrum.
• A hands-on activity that estimates how often mass extinctions occur on the Earth. Teachers (students) count big craters (large enough to cause a mass extinction) on the Moon, scale up to the size of the Earth, and then figure out how often these extinctions would occur over the age of the Solar System. In an advanced version of this activity, students can view a nearly full Moon with binoculars; these craters are conveniently ones that would cause a mass extinction. One of the most useful aspects of this activity is the inevitable discussion about all the approximations that go into this activity: a realistic insight into scientific research.

The participants will be provided with kits to implement the activities in the classroom, as well as the native Power Point presentations from which they can draw their own teaching materials. We also will provide access to online and print resources. Finally, continued mentoring of the participants will be a key part of the program. Team Leaders will be available to assist the teachers with incorporation of the activities into their classrooms, and they will be available for classroom visits.

Based on standard evaluation procedures, our previous similar workshops have been very successful. On a 5-point scale, teachers’ scores were raised over a full point based on self-evaluations, reaching 4.7-4.8 (where 5 is the highest score). The philosophy of the course and its activities have reached over 250 teachers and principals and tens of thousands of students.

Government sponsorship acknowledged.