Space Foundation Educators Named Master Teachers for NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement Mission

Three Space Foundation educators have been selected as Master Teachers for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM). The three are: Bryan DeBates, Director – Education, and Elias Molen and Jami Sunkel, Space Education Specialists (pictured from top to bottom).

GPM is an international mission that launched in early 2014 and is studying precipitation across the globe. GPM’s key educational themes include the water cycle, weather and climate, GPM’s instrumentation and technology and societal applications, such as drought, flooding and freshwater availability.

As GPM Master Teachers the three will:

• Attend monthly webinars with the other 24 GPM Master Teachers nationwide to share curriculum and outreach ideas and to share what they have been doing to promote the mission
• Pilot new GPM curriculum that NASA has developed
• Each write a lesson for the mission and share with the network, to then be shared with educators around the world
• Promote the GPM educational resources to contacts globally
• Promote GPM’s mission

As Master Teachers working at the Space Foundation, they will be the only GPM Master Teachers using Science On a Sphere® (SOS) to promote the mission, as well as showing the NASA short film Water Falls, the SOS movie connected with the mission. This 9-minute film, created by the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) specifically for Science On a Sphere, details the GPM mission. The film introduces viewers to the water cycle, and shows how water in the atmosphere regulates climate, the global and local consequences of too much or too little rain, water’s effect on society from food production to urban sustainability and the role of water in storms and hurricanes.

Science On a Sphere was developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and is a unique projection system that uses special software, satellite imagery and four projectors to render images onto the global surface that provide dramatic, full-motion views of the Earth, Sun, Moon and planets in space. The public may view SOS presentations at the Space Foundation Discovery Center. Learn more here.

This article is part of Space Watch: July 2014 (Volume: 13, Issue: 7).