School Kids Track LCROSS

On Oct. 9th, LCROSS will smash into the inky-dark shadows of a crater near the Moon's south pole in search of water. Eager youngsters are locked on to LCROSS's signal as intently as they've ever viewed a video game, and they're feeding NASA valuable data about the spacecraft's health and status.

see captionStudents attending 283 schools world-wide are participating in the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope Project, or GAVRT -- a joint project between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lewis Center for Educational Research. Boys and girls control the behemoth telescope via the internet and they have been learning how to do radio astronomy just like real mission scientists.

Right: The Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT). Brian Day of NASA Ames Research Center explains how the students "adopted" LCROSS. "Because LCROSS has a very steeply inclined orbit, we have only a 2-hour window once every 3 days when we can check out the spacecraft using the Deep Space Network. So we decided to ask GAVRT for help. These kids help us get extra listening time for our spacecraft, and they get an incredible educational experience in return."

Lewis Center founder Rick Piercy is the visionary who sparked GAVRT's creation, making this extraordinary hookup possible. "In 1994, I heard that NASA was decommissioning a fully functional radio telescope," says Piercy. "I knew that this particular telescope had been used to communicate with the Apollo spacecraft and realized that it was something special. I wanted it for the students at our school, the Academy for Academic Excellence. I figured we could load it up in a couple of pickup trucks and bring it to the school if we could get permission."

He called California Congressman Jerry Lewis, who put him in touch with then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. Piercy convinced Goldin and NASA to give the telescope to the school and make the instrument available to students nationwide.