NASA's Scientist for a Day Essay Contest & Resources for Educators

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Title: NASA Scientist for a Day Essay Contest & Resources for Educators

NASA's Scientist for a Day Essay Contest & Resources for Educators

NASA's Scientist for a Day Essay Contest is back for its 15th year, inviting students in grades 5 through 12 to investigate three distant worlds and write an essay about one they would want to explore further.

The worlds chosen for this year's contest are some of the most mysterious and distant in our solar system: Uranus' moon Miranda, Neptune's moon Triton and Pluto's moon Charon. Each has been visited by spacecraft during a single, brief flyby. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Miranda and Triton in the 1980s, and the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Charon in 2015. All three flybys provided the only up-close – and stunning – images we have of these worlds.

Entries for the U.S. contest are due Feb. 20, 2020, on the NASA Scientist for a Day website. (Deadlines for the international contests may vary by host country.) Visit the website for more information, including rules, international contest details and past winners.

For teachers interested in using the contest as a classroom assignment, learn more here. Plus, explore these standards-aligned lessons and activities to get students engaged in space travel and planetary science:

Related Lessons and Activities

	Lesson: Art and the Cosmic Connection (Grades K-12) – Students use art to describe and recognize the geology on planetary surfaces.
	Lesson: Solar System Bead Activity (Grades 1-6) – Students create a scale model of the solar system using beads and string.
	Lesson: Planetary Poetry (Grades 2-12) – In this cross-curricular STEM and language arts lesson, students learn about planets, stars and space missions and write STEM-inspired poetry to share their knowledge of or inspiration about these topics.
	*NEW* Lesson: Planetary Travel Time (Grades 4-6) – Students will compute the approximate travel time to planets in the solar system using different modes of transportation.
	Lesson: Sizing Up Pluto (Grades 4-12) – Using measurements taken by the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by Pluto in July 2015, students practice their math skills in a real-world application and see how new data can change scientific understanding.
	Lesson: Solar System Scroll (Grades 5-8) – Students predict the scale of our solar system and the distance between planets, then check their answers using fractions.
	*NEW* Lesson: Create a Solar System Scale Model With Spreadsheets (Grades 5-12) – In this activity, students use spreadsheet software and their knowledge of scale, proportion and ratios to develop a solar system model that fits on a playground.
	Lesson: Using Light to Study Planets (Grades 6-11) – Students build a spectrometer using basic materials as a model for how NASA uses spectroscopy to determine the nature of elements found on Earth and other planets.
	*NEW* Lesson: Kinesthetic Radial Model of the Solar System (Grades 6-11) – Students model the position of the planets around the Sun and then model viewing them from Earth on any given date.
	Video: Dancing Uranus – In the dance of our solar system, one planet has moves like no other: Uranus. Find out how the planet's tilt puts it in a league all its own.
	Slideshow: Ocean Worlds – Where might oceans – and living things – exist beyond Earth? Scientists have their eyes on these places in our own solar system.