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Spend the School Year With NASA-JPL

Make educational connections to NASA and JPL happenings all year long with this calendar of upcoming events and links to educational resources you can use to explore STEM with us throughout the 2023-2024 school year.

Aug. 17, 2023

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X-Ray Vision and Polarized Glasses Unite to Uncover Mysteries of the Universe

A NASA space telescope mission is giving astronomers a whole new way to peer into the universe, allowing us to uncover long-standing mysteries surrounding objects such as black holes. Find out how it works and how to engage students in the science behind the mission.

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Webb Telescope Sees the Universe Like We've Never Seen It Before

Here's what we learned from the first set of images captured by NASA's newest space observatory and how to translate it into learning opportunities for students.

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Telescopes Get Extraordinary View of Milky Way's Black Hole

Find out how scientists captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, why it's important, and how to turn it into a learning opportunity for students.

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Learn About the Universe With the James Webb Space Telescope

Get a look into the science and engineering behind the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built while exploring ways to engage learners in the mission.

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This Summer Intern Built a Spacecraft in Her Apartment

It sounds like a reality show: A team of six interns working remotely from their homes across the country given 10 weeks to build a prototype lunar spacecraft that can launch on a balloon over the California desert. But for Christine Yuan, a senior at Cornell University, it was just another engineering challenge.

Sept. 24, 2020

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NASA's 9 Most Teachable Moments This Decade and Beyond

Whether discovering something about our own planet or phenomena billions of miles away, NASA missions and scientists unveiled a vast universe of mysteries this past decade. And with each daring landing, visit to a new world and journey into the unknown came new opportunities to inspire the next generation of explorers. Read on for a look at some of NASA's most teachable moments of the decade from missions studying Earth, the solar system and beyond. Plus, find out what's next in space exploration and how to continue engaging students into the 2020s with related lessons, activities and resources.

Dec. 30, 2019

Teachable Moment .

How Scientists Captured the First Image of a Black Hole

Find out how scientists created a virtual telescope as large as Earth itself to capture the first image of a black hole's silhouette.

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When 'Intern Life' Means Studying How Life Got Started on Earth

Erika Flores might be the longest-serving intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a high-school student, she helped test the arm for the Phoenix Mars Lander, which launched about a year later, in 2007. When she returned in 2014 as an undergraduate intern, she joined a team of JPL scientists studying how life began on Earth. A chemical engineering student at Cal Poly at the time, Flores helped the team with one of its early breakthroughs, producing amino acids, which are central to life processes, under conditions found on early Earth. Now known as the "senior intern," Flores has been an integral part of the team ever since. Meanwhile, she's earned a bachelor's degree, was accepted to graduate school for environmental science and started writing her master's thesis. She also recently picked up a part-time gig helping the Mars 2020 rover team keep the spacecraft – which is being built at JPL – clear of microbes that could hitch a ride to the Red Planet. We caught up with Flores to ask what she plans to do next, how her internships have shaped her career path and, as she says with a laugh, how they've changed her personality.

Oct. 19, 2018

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Shining Light on the Science of Earth’s Auroras

There is still a lot of mystery around what exactly causes aurora, the swirling spectacles of light that grace Earth’s southern and northern high-latitude skies. So, this summer, Jasmine Cameron, a JPL intern and computer science major at Howard University, helped push aurora science further by developing an algorithm to detect the phenomena in video taken from a weather balloon. Fellow intern Evan Kramer caught up with Cameron to ask how learning about aurora might help the average person and what it’s like to work with NASA scientists and engineers.

Sept. 6, 2018