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The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) satellite mission, with its strong ties to UC Berkeley's academic and educational environment, has given undergraduate students the unique opportunity to work in the building and operation of a satellite on an astrophysics research mission. Since 1981, 250 undergraduate students have worked in all aspects of the EUVE project, from administration and management to hardware building and science data analysis. In order to expand our educational outreach to grades K--12, we have obtained an Astrophysics Grant Supplement to Education (AGSE) from NASA's Astrophysics Division to offer a satellite operations class for high school teachers in collaboration with San Francisco State University in the spring of 1994. During this class, the teachers will be given the tools to create lesson plans based on the EUVE NASA satellite mission. Within this context, we will present a hands-on demonstration of the EUVE satellite orbit, since we find that many K--12 students have trouble visualizing the idea of completing a full-sky survey in only six months instead of a year. The EUVE satellite is unique in that it also carried out a ``deep survey'' along the ecliptic, and is being used for inertial pointings now that the full-sky survey has been completed. The demonstration is able to explain all these phases of the satellite's mission, and it is easily constructed out of readily available materials. Teachers will be able to modify the demonstration of the EUVE orbit to explain all-sky survey strategies of several other NASA space missions.
This work was supported by NASA contract NAS5--29298.
