Muhlenberg College Receives Nasa Funding For Technology Enhancement
With the support of U.S. Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, Muhlenberg College has received a $1.5 million congressional appropriation to develop a science program that will bring NASA data and technologies into the classroom.Friday, August 9, 2002 02:54 PM
With the support of U.S. Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, Muhlenberg College has received a $1.5 million congressional appropriation to develop a science program that will bring NASA data and technologies into the classroom. The program will enhance education in physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, environmental science, mathematics and computer science.
Part of the funding will go to the purchase and installation of a robotic telescope on land adjacent to Australia's National Observatory in New South Wales, where it will be maintained by an observatory professional. The telescope will be available for use by Muhlenberg students and faculty as well as area elementary and secondary partnership schools by the spring of 2003. Because of the time difference between Allentown and New South Wales, students attending daytime classes will be able to study the southern night sky in real time via the Internet. The College will partner with Telescopes in Education to make the telescope available worldwide when it is not being used locally.
A NASA Teaching/Research fellow will be hired for a three-year term. The fellow will teach coursework utilizing NASA satellite data and will be a resource for College faculty and students in the area of accessing and using the new technologies. He or she will also develop undergraduate research programs for student/faculty teams.
The project will also fund remote sensing equipment for data collection at the Raker Field Station, which is owned by the College and includes wetlands and higher elevation land. Bird and nocturnal animal activity will be monitored unobtrusively. In addition, modifications to the Shankweiler Greenhouse on campus will allow biology students to study specimens acquired at the Raker Field Station.
"The ability to access data from across the solar system or across the Lehigh Valley will provide an important learning experience for our students. When students design their own remote sensing experiments, they gain experience with an increasingly important technology that will be very useful in the workplace or graduate study," says Dr. Robert Milligan, head of the physics department and one of the project directors.
The College also plans to create a NASA Learning Center on campus to allow access to NASA data. The Center will be equipped with high-end computers, a projection monitor, reference materials, direct access to the existing radio telescope on campus and other support materials. A site for summer workshops, seminars and research, the Center will be staffed by trained student interns who can assist college students and local K-12 teachers in utilizing its resources.
The program proposal was rated "excellent" by NASA officials, who noted the project's potential to "boost post secondary student, faculty and pre-service teacher use of NASA science and technology resources" in northeastern Pennsylvania, with the NASA Learning Center providing "an excellent classroom for educating students and teachers alike."
