Sally Ride EarthKAM is a NASAeducational outreach program started in 1996. The program, initiated by Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, allows students to direct a digital camera aboard the International Space Station to take photographs of specific places on Earth. During Sally Ride EarthKAM missions, middle school students around the world can submit requests to capture photographs of specific locations. There are typically four missions a year. Students’ requests are relayed to a camera on the ISS. The camera then images photographs of the designated locations, and the digitized images are transmitted from orbit through a TDRSS Ku band satellite link to Johnson Space Center Mission Control. The images ultimately are posted on the Sally Ride EarthKAM website, where students can view and study them. The project is run cooperatively by the University of Alabama in Huntsville; Teledyne Brown Engineering; Johnson Space Center; U.S. Space and Rocket Center; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since the program’s creation, cameras aboard the space shuttle and later the ISS have taken thousands of photographs of Earth. The entire collection of Sally Ride EarthKAM images is available in a searchable Sally Ride EarthKAM image archive. To take part in the program, teachers sign up on the Sally Ride EarthKAM website and then receive code words that are used to track image requests.
History
JoBea Holt, an Earth scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, had the idea for KidSat and worked with Sally Ride, Elizabeth Stork from Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and JPL engineers to implement it in 1995. A Special Section of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing presents the KidSat missions along with the science, engineering and education that were integral to the program. The program allowed middle school students to capture images of Earth using a camera aboard the Space Shuttle. The program operated during five shuttle flights. KidSat was renamed EarthKAM in 1998. In 2001, the camera moved to the International Space Station, and the program was renamed ISS EarthKAM. After Ride's death in 2012, NASA renamed the program Sally Ride EarthKAM in her honor. EarthKAM captured the first photo of Earth from the newly installed Window Observational Research Facility. Sally Ride EarthKAM received the Top Results Award at the Third Annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference, held June 17–19, 2014.
