KidSat is a NASA pilot programme to investigate means of providing access to space-borne experiments for high-school students. The primary aims of the programme were to capture children's interest, to advance their education in science-based subjects and to develop an infrastructure to foster intellectual exploration using images of the Earth from space. More than 50 schools took part, mainly in the United States but also in Britain and South Africa.
The KidSat programme gave high-school students access to a digital camera flown on three space-shuttle missions between March 1996 and October 1997. The camera was mounted to look vertically downward, and was operated remotely from the ground, without requiring the shuttle crew's intervention. Through a special ground-control network, groups of pupils could put in requests for images of specific locations, and take part in the development and planning of each space flight. NASA provided software so that pupils could manipulate the digital images to enhance particular features.
KidSat enabled students to carry out original research, and several projects are presented in a special section of the journal
Fortuitously, the final mission of the KidSat programme (STS-86, 25 September 1997 – 6 October 1997) coincided with the beginning of the fires in Indonesia which raged out of control in 1997 and 1998. Conray Tseng, Norman Hung and Shannon Jue at La Cañada High School, Cañada, California were amongst the first to study these great fires from space, using a set of 12 images to determine their extent and severity. By viewing overlapping pairs of images to give a three-dimensional picture of the area, the students were able to distinguish high-rising normal cloud from the low haze arising from the burning. They were also able to spot the sites of individual fires by tracing streaks of smoke back to their origins.
The images, taken at an early stage of the Indonesian fires, show that the burning was then confined to the northwestern part of Sumatra, and had not yet spread to the southern part of the island. Because they obtained images early in the progress of the fires, Tseng, Hung and Jue were able to document various stages in the development of the layer of smog that blanketed much of southeast Asia in 1997 and 1998. The KidSat images show unburned forest, isolated fires and continuous smoke cover.
This project, among many others, shows how school children can be enthused by science. By simply giving schools a window into an observation system, pupils could initiate and carry through their own investigations into the world around them. The results published this month show the breadth of research and depth of interest generated by a relatively limited, low-cost instrument.