CLEVELAND — The 19th annual Young Astronaut Day will be held on Saturday, Nov. 5, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
Three hundred fifty students from 28 local schools and youth organizations will fill Glenn’s aircraft hangar and participate in fun and competitive events that are designed to stimulate the students’ interest in aeronautics, space science and engineering.
NASA astronaut Mike Foreman will deliver the keynote address. A native of Wadsworth, Ohio, Foreman was selected to join the astronaut corps in 1998. A veteran of two space flights, Foreman flew on STS-123 in March 2008 and STS-129 in November 2009. He has logged over 637 hours in space, including 32 hours and 19 minutes during five spacewalks. Foreman also served as Chief of the External Programs Division at Glenn from June 2010 to May 2011.
Students in grades one through six will be assigned to the Pilot teams and their challenges include repairing items “in space,” fabricating and testing airfoils for a wind tunnel experiment, balancing marbles on a plate in a vacuum chamber, and designing composite tiles.
Students in grades seven through 12 will be assigned to the Commander teams. Their challenges include building a robot that can travel across a simulated planetary surface, designing a balloon-powered rocket car that incorporates Newton’s Laws of Motion and jet propulsion, designing and building a folding structure to simulate a large solar array for spacecraft, and constructing a paper bridge that is strong enough to support several “weights” while demonstrating the force of tension.
Additionally, the students will bring donations of approximately two thousand canned food items in order to build a structure that will resemble a space shuttle. Afterward, the finished structure will be photographed and the canned food items will be given to Canstruction, a unique food charity, which will coordinate donating the canned foods to the Cleveland Foodbank.
Volunteers from Glenn and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Northern Ohio Section sponsor Young Astronaut Day.
Media representatives interested in covering the event may contact Sally Harrington or the Media Relations Office at 216-433-2901 by 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 4 to obtain security clearance.
The following Ohio schools and youth organizations will be participating at the event:
Avon: Avon Cub Scout Pac #333 and Avon Girl Scout Troop #882
Bay Village: Bay Village Middle School and Westerly School
Bedford: St. Peter Chanel High School
Berea: Academy of St. Adalbert and Roehm Middle School
Birchwood: Birchwood School
Black River: Black River High School
Brook Park: Ford Middle School
Bryan: St. Patrick Catholic School
Cleveland: Central Middle School, Girl Scoot Troop #70096 and Rhodes
High School
Cleveland Heights: Beaumont High School
Galion: Northmor Junior High School
Kinsman: Badger Elementary School
Oberlin: Oberlin Comets and Oberlin Rockets
Parma Heights: Parma Heights Christian Academy
Rocky River: Magnificat High School
Shaker Heights: University School
Sheffield: Sheffield Middle School
University Heights: GESU Catholic School
Westerville: Edison Academy
Westlake: Lee Burneson Middle School
For more information about NASA Glenn, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/glenn