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P. Plait, S. Silva, T. Graves, G. Simonnet, S. Spear, G. Slater, T. Borders, L. Cominsky (Sonoma State University)
XMM-Newton is a joint NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) orbiting observatory, designed to observe high energy X-rays emitted from exotic astronomical objects such as pulsars, black holes, and active galaxies. It was launched on December 10, 1999 from the ESA base at Kourou, French Guiana and continues to make observations today. In 2003, The NASA E/PO Group at Sonoma State University took the lead for the US portion of the XMM-Newton Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) program. This program is using the mission science to engage students in science and math learning. Currently we are working on developing curriculum materials for grades 6-12. One such product, developed with our new partners at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA, is a Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy (CLEA) exercise on X-ray spectroscopy of a supernova remnant. The XMM-Newton E/PO program has also partnered with the GLAST Telescope Network (GTN) and the AAVSO to help coordinate observations of magnetic white dwarfs called polars. This year, the XMM-Newton outreach program will begin the development of a Starlab Planetarium show which will depict the X-ray sky. In addition, the outreach program has created a website (mirrored at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) designed to enhance the XMM-Newton mission’s science education. More educational materials and information about the XMM-Newton E/PO program can be found at http://xmm.sonoma.edu.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://xmm.sonoma.edu. 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.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: sarah@universe.sonoma.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.