Carroll students team up with NASA

With the help of his classmates, Clark Hindman, a Eubanks Intermediate fifth-grader, used a pencil and a special tool to trace a magnet’s magnetic field.

The 11 year old spent a week learning about space and how his science lab related to NASA’s upcoming Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) launching on March 12.

Students and NASA officials capped off the week with a MMS launch party Friday night at the Carroll ISD Observatory.

Troy Cline, NASA’s educational outreach lead, spent the week with the students teaching them about the mission.

NASA will launch the Magnetospheric Multiscale, composed of four spacecraft, that will orbit the Earth to study magnetic reconnection — a phenomenon of positive and negative charged particles that release a burst of energy and which makes up about 99 percent of the observable universe.

“I learned magnetic reconnection is really powerful,” Hindman said.

The four spacecraft will travel to areas known for magnetic reconnection, including on the sun-side where reconnection can bring the sun’s magnetic field and the Earth’s together, allowing material and energy from the sun to move into the Earth’s magnetic environment.

NASA believes reconnection helps create the Northern or Southern lights’ auroras.

Cline said it is important for this generation of students to understand how the sun will impact technology as people use it more in their everyday lives.

“This generation has every opportunity to go to the moon and Mars,” Cline said in a classroom filled with fifth-graders.

“We have to learn how to live with our star the sun.”

Cline said the project Hindman and his classmates were working to create STEAM — art in science, technology, engineering and math education.

“Being a scientist or engineer is a creative process,” Cline said. “It is a mistake to divorce that creative part.”

Hindman took on the role of a journalist and created an animated visual explanation of the mission.

Other students took on the role of scientists and engineers.

Anisha Kanukolanu and Caitlin Midkiff, seventh-graders at Dawson Middle School, used magnets and copper wire to illustrate the power of magnetic reconnection.

The girls worked on their project for about a month, and while they confessed the love science, there was another reason they got involved.

“When we heard NASA we were all ears,” Midkiff said. “And we were all going for it.”

Other students made art inspired by the mission and Laurence Gartel the father of digital art.

This story was originally published February 24, 2015 at 9:14 AM with the headline "Carroll students team up with NASA."