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L. Mayo (NASA Goddard), A.E. Schweitzer (Little Thompson Observatory (LTO)), G. Clark (NASA JPL), S. Hoban (U. of MD Baltimore County), T.T. Melsheimer (Meridian Controls, LTO)
The NASA-sponsored Telescopes In Education (TIE) project (http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov) has been wildly successful in engaging the K-12 education community in real-time, hands-on, interactive astronomy activities. Hundreds of schools in the US, Australia, Canada, England, and Japan have participated in the TIE program, remotely controlling the 24-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory from their classrooms. In recent years, several (approximately 20 to date) other telescopes have been, or are in the process of being, outfitted for remote use as TIE affiliates.
Global TIE integrates these telescopes seamlessly into one virtual observatory and provides the services required to operate this facility, including a scheduling service, tools for data manipulation, an online proposal review environment, an online “Virtual TIE Student Ap J” for publication of results, and access to related educational materials provided by the TIE community.
Global TIE seeks to establish a network of research grade telescopes, no longer useful to the professional astronomical community, that can be made accessible to schools all across the country through existing IT technologies and applications. These telescopes could provide unparalleled research and educational opportunities for a broad spectrum of K-12 and college students and turns underutilized observatory facilities into valuable, state-of-the-art teaching centers.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://tie.jpl.nasa.gov. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.