Richardson’s Physics teacher George Hademenos and Special Ed teacher Diane Watson are among 12 pairs of teachers selected from around the country to join NASA scientists on a mission to carry out research and observe how airborne infrared astronomy is conducted.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, is a modified 747 jet equipped with a special eight foot diameter telescope. The teachers will be flying at altitudes around 45,000 feet – about 10,000 feet higher than an average jet.
“We were literally the only pair, not only in Texas, but also in the Southwest, that was accepted,” Hademenos said.
NASA will invite two pairs of teachers at a time to go on one week training missions outside San Jose at the AIMS research center. There they will have a short training session before the actual flight.
“It’s not going to be a rigorous training process,” Hademenos said. “They are going to talk to us about the plane, the equipment and the instrumentation.”
The teachers will take two night flights after their training during which they will observe and collect data, while the astronomers do their research with the telescope built into the aircraft.
“I’m excited about bringing this back and making information and opportunity available to kids of all walks of life,” Watson said. “Personally, as a teacher, I’m very interested in cross-curricular learning, like what you learn in social studies has meaning in English, and what we’re doing in physics is linked to math. And that covers from kids in AP to students who really struggle and everybody in between.”
Hademenos and Watson have spent a fair amount of time talking about how they plan on using the information they gain from the experience when they return.
“The whole idea of us doing this is to have this exposure and this experience and to come back into our schools and communities and be ambassadors for science – to get kids excited about science and space travel and the inventions that come about as a result of space exploration,” Watson said.
Hademenos said he plans to build on past research conducted with students, particularly his weather balloon experiment where he sent a weather balloon with a GPS attached into the air to collect data. He said getting a wider range of students involved in projects like this one is the ultimate goal.
“We would like to expand [the weather balloon experiment] to have math students involved with the data crunching, to have robotics students perhaps take part in building the structure of the weather balloon, and physics students to conduct the experiments,” Watson said. “We even talked about the elementary intern kids – the kids who want to be elementary school teachers – bring them in and have their kids come too in order to experience the process and write books that children could understand about that activity.”
Hademenos said talk of the SOFIA Aircraft Mission began when he attended a NASA workshop two years before. There was a period of time when the government decided not to fund the program any longer. Eventually, they went back on a quest for money to restart the program.
“I had gotten a circular through the Science Teachers Association of Texas where they mentioned this opportunity and I remembered hearing about it a few years before,” Hademenos said. “I decided to revisit it so I approached a colleague here who teaches special ed. She has a background not only in science, but also in math and she was equally excited about it and we decided to submit our application as a team.”
The application required one teacher with a background in physics, or astrophysics, and another teacher from STEM – science technology engineering or math. Teachers were to gather recommendations from their principals, and convey in the application not only an interest in learning more about science, but also in bringing new information back to inspire students and the rest of the community about the opportunities in space science.
“Dr. H and I taught together before and he had my son in class so we’d known each other for years, and he asked me to join him on the quest,” Watson said.
Watson was eating her lunch at her desk when the call from NASA came. When they informed her she had been chosen along with Hademenos for the mission and that he hadn’t answered his phone to receive the news, she ran upstairs to tell him, and then the two hurried to tell Principal Charles Bruner.
“Had I not been sitting at my desk eating lunch I would’ve missed the phone call too,” Watson said.
Hademenos and Watson said they are excited to bring back information from the mission to share with the rest of the community.
“I consider myself not only a teacher, but also a student – I love to learn,” Hademenos said. “I want to be able to come back to the classroom and be able show you, to tell you, to talk about what’s going on in to today’s society especially with space. There is so much to learn about, and its great to hear about it from a teacher who has actually participated in some of those activities.”