SAGE III on ISS Successfully Launched, Now We Have to Catch!

While we wait for SAGE to get turned on, here are high school activities on SAGE to bring out the STEM.

After launch on Saturday was aborted, we are excited to share that SAGE did successfully launch to the space station on board a Falcon 9 Rocket on February 19.  You can watch a video of the launch here.

So now that it hitched a ride into space, now what?  Well, we have to catch it.  The SAGE instrument is still sitting inside of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.  A planned rendezvous to then dock with the International Space Station was planned for today but has since been postponed until tomorrow.  An astronaut onboard the ISS will need to use hook-type tool to bring in the Dragon spacecraft.  Then, robotic systems will slowly install the SAGE instrument onto the ISS. The whole process will take until mid-March and NASA hopes to turn the SAGE instrument on in about three weeks.

While we anxiously await for everything to get in place and get turned on, you can start introducing your students to all of the many STEM aspects of this great mission.  Note that in practice science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are all integrated in making a mission possible.  Missions have goals of science understanding.  Those goals help create the foundation for the technology that needs to be used to collect data to answer science questions. The technology and even location of the instrumentation creates constraints for the engineers to put it all together.  Mathematics is the language that ties all of these components together and we use math to confirm to the team that our plan will work.

If you want to add more SAGE specific activities to your GLOBE investigations, take a look at SAGE formal education lessons.  I think the SAGE lessons for the High School level do a good job of incorporating STEM. 

• Start out with the SAGE Launchpad eClips video SAGE III on ISS.
• Do “Making Measurements From the International Space Station” activity that helps emphasize why scientists need long term data records.
• Do some of the SpaceMath SAGE activities – these are great way to really focus on math skills and why they are important to all applications.
• Finally, you might want to start introducing science articles by reading, “NASA Langley Ozone Sensor Set for Launch to Space Station.”  I really like this one because it also tells us a little bit more about Brooke, a mechanical engineer, and one of the many people that make this mission possible. 

I'll be sure to update the GLOBE community again, once SAGE III on ISS in on!

Read more about SAGE, and keep up with current mission activities at: https://sage.nasa.gov/