Dolores Beasley

Headquarters, Washington March 18, 2002

(Phone: 202/358-1753)

Mark Hess
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-8982)

RELEASE: 02-57

MARCH 20 IS NATIONAL SUN-EARTH CONNECTION AWARENESS DAY

The second annual Sun-Earth Day will "Celebrate the

Equinox" on March 20 with programs and activities at NASA
Centers and a two-hour televised webcast featuring
discussions on the Sun's connection to the Earth through
images, cultural parallels and activities that Native
Americans have used to share Sun-Earth science through
several generations.

Groups in classrooms, museums, shopping malls, planetariums

and auditoriums around the world will participate in Sun-
Earth Day -- a celebration of the Sun, the space around the
Earth (geospace) and how both affect life on the planet.

Nearly every NASA Center and NASA Educator Resource Center

has planned an event for science teachers and students or for
the public in conjunction with Sun-Earth Day. Specifically,
more than 4,500 science teachers have been invited to
education workshops related to the science of the Sun-Earth
connection.

NASA Television will air the special two-hour webcast on

March 20 from 1 to 3 p.m. EST. Host Paul Mortfield, an
astronomer from the Stanford Solar Center in Stanford,
Calif., will be joined by students at NASA's Ames Research
Center, Moffett Field, Calif., to share the results of
activities designed to learn more about the Sun.

The webcast will begin with an explanation of the Lakota

celebration of the equinox at Harney Peak, S.D. This
introduction will include Lakota cultural parallels to the
science of the Sun. The program also will feature a
discussion with Astronaut John Young -- who made his first
trip to space in a Gemini two-man capsule, walked on the moon
on Apollo 16 and commanded the first space shuttle flight --
about the effects of the Sun on space travel.

Another activity will be "Telescopes in Education," in which

participants will turn solar telescopes toward the Sun and
explore the only star that can be studied up close. NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will host more
than 60 children from Eliot Middle School. Via the Internet,
the students will operate a telescope located at Mount Wilson
Observatory, high above the Los Angeles basin in the San
Gabriel Mountains.

The Telescopes In Education program allows educators and

students around the world to remotely control research-
quality telescopes and cameras created at JPL and located at
the Mount Wilson Observatory. All they need is a computer
with a modem and special astronomy software.

The Sun-Earth Day event is sponsored by NASA's Sun-Earth

Connection Education Forum, Ames Research Center and the
Stanford Solar Center.

More information on the webcast can be found at:

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/sso/events/stanford_solar/sunearthd
ay1.html

More information about Sun-Earth Days events in other

communities is available at:
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/sunearthday/

-end-