A NASA Visit in Second Grade
The second graders began exploring women that have made a difference such as Jane Goodall, Katherine Johnson, and Mae Jemison. Last week, they focused on women in space and ended the week with a special visitor–Greta Studier from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Greta is a Systems Engineer who designed the sample tubes that the Mars Perseverance Rover is using to collect soil during its exploration of the Red Planet. Her work continues with the design of a storage unit (also known as the “parking lot”) to hopefully bring the samples back to Earth in the future. Next up, Greta will help design the Europa Clipper spacecraft that will investigate whether there is life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
The students were full of questions for our visiting expert:
- “What character traits have helped you achieve your goals?”
- “What is your favorite part about being an engineer?”
- “What was challenging about building the Perseverance Rover?”
- “What’s your favorite rocket?”
In response to the question, “Do YOU think there’s life on other planets?”, Greta told the class that no one really knows yet. She challenged them to become scientists when they grow up and find out for themselves. Finally, Greta ended with a special surprise look at the duplicate of the Perseverance Rover, one that JPL uses to conduct experiments on Earth before executing them on Mars. The awe of the children was audible as some spotted the NASA logo in the background and uttered, “Woah, she’s really there!” The cherry on top was when an engineer running a test on the rover broke out into the floss! As you can imagine, lots of second-grade laughter ensued––scientists know how to have fun too!
If you would like to learn more about Mars, you might try out this game: