NASA-Macquarie University Pilbara Education Project
In June/July, 2005, an international field trip to a key Mars analog site, the Pilbara in Western Australia, served to create and inform a new addition to a suite of virtual ‘lenses’ and tools, developed by NASA, aimed at students and the public. The result was Virtual Field Trip tool, co-developed between NASA and Macquarie University in Sydney, and launched on the NASA portal on May 23, 2006, together with a dedicated Pilbara Wiki site, and a US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and NASA TV documentary made by the New Jersey-based production company Passport to Knowledge.
A team of educators and communicators, including the Passport to Knowledge documentary TV crew, joined 30 geologists, microbiologists, geochemists and other experts in a field trip aimed at establishing the degree of certainty to which 3.5 billion year-old stromatolite structures found in the Pilbara could be considered the earliest evidence of life on Earth.
The NASA-Macquarie University Pilbara Education Project captures ‘science in the making’ during the field trip. It uses the Virtual Field Trip tool, and employs other ‘lenses’ and tools already developed by NASA Learning Technologies, including World Wind, Virtual Lab and What’s the Difference?. In addition the Pilbara Wiki site at http://pilbara.mq.edu.au supports data searching and basic background information.
Widespread use of the Internet combined with access to inexpensive, but very powerful, desktop computing makes these technological visualisations freely accessible to all. The project is now going to field testing with high schools, with an eventual possible outcome that the tools will be linked together and accessed via World Wind.
The Virtual Field Trip and Virtual Lab
NASA's World Wind - Olympus Mons on Mars
Last Updated: July 2, 2006