Teacher-astronaut Morgan rings the school bell out in space

William Atkins
Wednesday, 15 August 2007 20:22

Science - Space

U.S. teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan held her first classroom session on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, 2007 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station (ISS). The schoolchildren, no doubt, thought it was out of this world.           

Children from the Discovery Center of Idaho, in Boise, attended the long-distance class, which lasted just under one-half hour. Morgan was helped by Canadian astronaut Dave Williams and U.S. astronaut Alvin Drew, both from the Endeavour crew, and U.S. astronaut Clay Anderson, from the ISS crew.

All four of the crewmembers answered questions from the schoolchildren. Questions were asked about microgravity (what some people call weightlessness), the twinkling of stars, and being a teacher versus an astronaut. They used various teaching devices such as ping pong balls and a softball, along with red floating blobs of a drink mixture in order to visualize how to drink liquids in space.

Morgan will conduct two other teaching sessions later in the STS-118 mission, one from the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in Alexandria, Virginia (on Thursday) and the other from the Robert L. Ford NASA Explorer School in Lynn, Massachusetts (on Sunday).