the shores of lake erie are not your
typical school laboratory and that's
exactly the point of a unique
educational effort initiated by nasa's
lewis research center in cleveland ohio
called the student remote sensing
project it's designed to excite young
people like these from saint edward high
school about scientific research
the measurements they're taking today
were part of 18 environmental impact
studies they've designed themselves
shoreline erosion and the flow of
effluent from wastewater treatment
plants are two of the topics under
consideration
as with any research proposal the
students had to prepare an abstract
determine the equipment they needed to
carry out their studies
and describe the specific research
procedures they plan to use
they'll also have to prepare reports
summarizing their conclusions
while these student researchers collect
ground truth data one of their teachers
brother david martin works with nasa
pilot bill ricky to produce aerial
photographs used in the studies
their aircraft is an old t-34 navy
trainer salvaged from a storage facility
in arizona and given new life by the
lewis aircraft maintenance team before
leaving the hangar two cameras one a
standard model and the other an infrared
are mounted in the plane's fuselage
to bill rickey who spent a lot of time
in advanced fighter jets the t-34 is
hardly a high-performance aircraft
but for brother martin the experience is
like something out of top gun
ricky positions the aircraft and martin
triggers the cameras which look through
two
by comparing what they see in the
imagery with measurements gathered in
the field students employ the same
scientific principles used by
professional researchers and they had
nothing to begin with no cookbook recipe
no guidance no hints they had to design
it for themselves
i want them to take the film
see what they can do with it maybe it
will answer the question they raised
maybe it won't but that's the beauty of
science and in that sense it'll be a
real learning experience it's not
something that was given to them they
can see now that they could put
something together which is actually
their own
in a sense they are creating something
new for each and every one of these
experiments we did
the goal is to involve more students and
schools around the country and to use
the t34 to do other types of classroom
related studies including newton's laws
of motion
and microgravity research
nasa's student remote sensing project
giving today's young people a head start
on tomorrow's technological challenges