In addition to those four NASA missions, E/PO is also working an CanSat project for secondary school students and an online college cosmology course equivalent to a second year undergraduate astronomy course.
TOPS Educational Guides: "Far Out Math," "Scale the Universe," and "Pi in the Sky" are a series of TOPS Learning Systems activity books which introduce students to the science and technology of Fermi while at the same time teaching them basic mathematics and astronomy concepts.
GTN: The Global Telescope Network is a consortium of small ground-based visible-light telescopes being used by amateur astronomers and high-school and college students to support gamma-ray observations with Fermi.
Active Galaxy Pop-up Book: This short, innovative book for ages 8–12 has three separate activities, including a popup 3D galaxy showing its features, and the "Tasty Active Galaxy."
Swift is a NASA gamma-ray burst explorer satellite, launched on November 20, 2004. The main Swift E/PO website is: http://swift.sonoma.edu/ The resources provided by SSU's NASA E/PO are:
Gamma-Ray Burst Website: This is a real-time map displaying GRB locations in the sky with additional information about ground-based follow-up and satellite observations.
GEMS Guide: "Invisible Universe: the Electromagnetic Spectrum from Radio Waves to Gamma Rays." E/PO partnered with GEMS to create an activity book which uses the mystery of gamma-ray bursts to teach about the electromagnetic spectrum.
The Swift Glider: The Swift satellite is named for an agile bird that catches its food on the fly. This is a paper airplane designed to look like a Swift that you can build yourself. The kit comes with pre-printed heavy-duty colored paper, and assembly only takes a few minutes.
Newton's Laws of Motion: This is a set of four posters, one for each law of motion, and one for Newton's Law of Gravitation, with accompanying classroom activities. The activities were created to complement each other as an overall unit, in science and/or mathematics. Newly revised, these reprinted by the fall of 2007.
XMM-Newton is a European Space Agency X-ray spectroscopy observatory launched in December 1999. In 2003, SSU took the lead for the US portion of the E/PO program. The main XMM-Newton E/PO website is: http://xmm.sonoma.edu . Resources provided by SSU's NASA E/PO are:
Space Place Black Hole Rescue: In this game, developed with partners at the Space Place, you must rescue words, one letter at a time, before they are pulled in by the powerful gravity of the black hole.
XMM-Newton Mission Ruler: This English/metric ruler showcases some of the X-ray images obtained using XMM-Newton, and provides descriptive captions on the reverse side.
Dying Stars and the Birth of the Elements CLEA Lab: In this computer-based exercise, high school and college students analyze realistically simulated X-ray spectra of a supernova remnant and determine the abundances of various elements in it.
Portable Planetarium Show: Still in the development phase, this will be an X-ray digital planetarium show designed to use in small portable planetaria.
NuSTAR is the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array which was launched in 2012. E/PO materials and resources for NuSTAR are forthcoming.
EAs
Educator Ambassadors
NASA E/PO coordinates the Astrophysics Educator Ambassador Program, consisting of 17 master educators who work with different NASA scientists and E/PO team members at SSU to develop and test workshops and curriculum materials, which are then distributed through the National Science Teacher's Association (NSTA), the California Science Teacher's Association (CSTA) and other regional, state and local conferences.
Space Mysteries are web-driven, inquiry-based games that are aligned to national science and mathematics standards. Students have fun while learning and trying to solve the original 3 mysteries which were sponsored by NASA's LEARNERS program: Alien Bandstand, Live! from 2-Alpha and Starmarket. The newest mystery - "Solar Supernova?" - was sponsored by GLAST E/PO and is now ready for you to play!
S4: SSU E/PO is developing a program called Small Satellites for Secondary Students (S4) that will integrate rocket and High-altitude balloon launches with student designed, non-militar/non-munition Payload (air and space craft) based on Bob Twiggs' CanSat design.
Cosmology: In conjunction with Chicago State University and UNLV, SSU E/PO is designing an online full semester cosmology course complete with interactive apps and ebook.
High energy astronomy is the study of astronomical objects that release electromagnetic radiation of highly energetic wavelengths. It includes X-ray astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy, and extreme UV astronomy, as well as studies of neutrinos and cosmic rays. The physical study of these phenomena is referred to as high-energy astrophysics.
A magnetar is a type of neutron star believed to have an extremely powerful magnetic field (∼1013 to 1015 G, ∼109 to 1011 T). The magnetic field decay powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays. The theory regarding these objects was proposed by Robert Duncan and Christopher Thompson in 1992, but the first recorded burst of gamma rays thought to have been from a magnetar had been detected on March 5, 1979. During the following decade, the magnetar hypothesis became widely accepted as a likely explanation for soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs).
The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a Flagship-class space telescope launched aboard the Space ShuttleColumbia during STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2020.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST), formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, is being used to study gamma-ray bursts.
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, previously called the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, is a NASA space observatory designed to detect gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). It was launched on November 20, 2004, aboard a Delta II rocket. Headed by principal investigator Neil Gehrels, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the mission was developed in a joint partnership between Goddard and an international consortium from the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. The mission is operated by Pennsylvania State University as part of NASA's Medium Explorers program (MIDEX).
INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) is a space telescope for observing gamma rays of energies up to 8 MeV. It was launched by the European Space Agency into Earth orbit in 2002, and is designed to provide imaging and spectroscopy of cosmic sources in this realm of supra-thermal and nuclear radiation. It is the most sensitive gamma ray observatory in space in this energy range, above the energy window of X-ray instruments such as NuSTAR, the Neil Gehrels SWIFT Observatory, XMM-Newton, and below high-energy gamma-ray instruments such Fermi and HESS. INTEGRAL's science targets are relativistic and supra-thermal particles in violent sources, radioactivity from nucleosynthesis sources, X-ray binaries, and transients of all types, including gamma-ray bursts. Its all-sky sensitive gamma-ray detector of the SPI Spectrometer anticoincidence is the most-sensitive gamma-ray detector in space and useful for gamma-ray counterpart searches of transients such as reported by gravitational-wave event detectors.
NuSTAR is a space-based X-ray telescope that uses a conical approximation to a Wolter telescope to focus high energy X-rays from astrophysical sources, especially for nuclear spectroscopy, and operates in the range of 3 to 79 keV.
Cornelis A. "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy. He was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the Principal Investigator. He was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
SN 1979C was a supernova about 50 million light-years away in Messier 100, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. The Type II supernova was discovered April 19, 1979 by Gus Johnson, a school teacher and amateur astronomer. This type of supernova is known as a core collapse and is the result of the internal collapse and violent explosion of a large star. A star must have at least 9 times the mass of the Sun in order to undergo this type of collapse. The star that resulted in this supernova was estimated to be in the range of 20 solar masses.
Gamma-ray astronomy is the astronomical observation of gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, with photon energies above 100 keV. Radiation below 100 keV is classified as X-rays and is the subject of X-ray astronomy.
The Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) is an international consortium of astronomers created in 1997, with the aim to study a particular category of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) called blazars, which are characterized by strong and fast brightness variability, on time scales down to hours or less.
GRB 011211 was a gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected on December 11, 2001. A gamma-ray burst is a highly luminous flash associated with an explosion in a distant galaxy and producing gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, and often followed by a longer-lived "afterglow" emitted at longer wavelengths.
David Louis Band or David L. Band was an astronomer who studied the theory of gamma-ray bursts.
GRB 101225A, also known as the "Christmas burst", was a cosmic explosion first detected by NASA's Swift observatory on Christmas Day 2010. The gamma-ray emission lasted at least 28 minutes, which is unusually long. Follow-up observations of the burst's afterglow by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories were unable to determine the object's distance using spectroscopic methods.
GRB 130427A was a record-setting gamma-ray burst, discovered starting on April 27, 2013. This GRB was associated to SN 2013cq, of which the appearance of optical signal was predicted on May 2, 2013 and detected on May 13, 2013. The Fermi space observatory detected a gamma-ray with an energy of at least 94 billion electron volts. It was simultaneously detected by the Burst Alert Telescope aboard the Swift telescope and was one of the brightest bursts Swift had ever detected. It was one of the five closest GRBs, at about 3.6 billion light-years away, and was comparatively long-lasting.
Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) recorded one gamma ray with an energy of at least 94 billion electron volts (GeV), or some 35 billion times the energy of visible light, and about three times greater than the LAT's previous record. The GeV emission from the burst lasted for hours, and it remained detectable by the LAT for the better part of a day, setting a new record for the longest gamma-ray emission from a GRB.
Multi-messenger astronomy is astronomy based on the coordinated observation and interpretation of disparate "messenger" signals. Interplanetary probes can visit objects within the Solar System, but beyond that, information must rely on "extrasolar messengers". The four extrasolar messengers are electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays. They are created by different astrophysical processes, and thus reveal different information about their sources.
Patrizia Caraveo is an Italian astrophysicist.
Lynn Cominsky is an American astrophysicist and educator. She is currently the Chair of Astronomy and Physics at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, as well as the Project Director for the NASA Education and Public Outreach Group.
SN 2018cow was a very powerful astronomical explosion, 10–100 times brighter than a normal supernova, spatially coincident with galaxy CGCG 137-068, approximately 200 million ly (60 million pc) distant in the Hercules constellation. It was first detected on 16 June 2018 by the ATLAS-HKO telescope, and had generated significant interest among astronomers throughout the world. Later, on 10 July 2018, and after AT 2018cow had significantly faded, astronomers, based on follow-up studies with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), formally described AT 2018cow as SN 2018cow, a type Ib supernova, showing an "unprecedented spectrum for a supernova of this class"; although others, mostly at first but also more recently, have referred to it as a type Ic-BL supernova. An explanation to help better understand the unique features of AT 2018cow has been presented.
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![SN 2018cow Very powerful astronomical explosion, 10–100 times brighter than a normal [[supernova]]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/Possible_AT2018cow_244.000927647_%2B22.2680094118_20180624.png/320px-Possible_AT2018cow_244.000927647_%2B22.2680094118_20180624.png)