Track discoball-like satellite online
They'll be plotting the "Starshine" (see http://www.azinet.com/starshine/) satellite's orbit, incorporating their observations into science and math curricula and sharing their data on the Web.
It may be 20 years too late to save disco, but NASA put the spinning, mirrored ball into orbit Saturday.
The 19-inch sphere, covered with nearly 900 highly polished aluminum mirrors, is meant to catch light from the sun and reflect it to Earth.
"Essentially it's a discoball," said Linda Ham, a NASA flight director.
As part of the project, the mirrors were polished by 25,000 students in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Finland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the United States and Zimbabwe.
The 88-pound satellite was launched from the payload bay of the space shuttle Discovery by Canadian astronaut Julie Payette. "It's up there," Payette said. "The first thing we all saw was the flickering of the mirrors."
As Starshine orbits Earth for the next eight months, reflected light from its mirrors will be visible during twilight hours to observers on the ground as far north as central Canada and the northern tip of Scotland and as far south as the southern tip of South America, South Africa and New Zealand.
The idea is to measure the satellite's movements against the position of stars, tracking its orbit to see how it changes over time.
The satellite's designer, Gilbert Moore, a retired U.S. Air Force Academy professor, said he got the idea from his own observations of Sputnik, Explorer and Vanguard satellites at the dawn of the space age more than 40 years ago.
"Back then I thought it would be a cool thing to have students run their own network instead of always having the professionals run the show," Moore said. "Now kids have access to personal computers, and the Internet allows them to take data anywhere in the world free."
The tracking Web site is at www.azinet.com/starshine.
Reuters contributed to this story.