The SIR-C Education Program (SIR-CED)

NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has produced an educational package entitled `The SIR-C Education Program´ (SIR-CED), designed as a two- to three-week module for Middle School and High School students. SIR-C stands for Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C and is the acronym used for a radar instrument flown on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in April of 1994 and scheduled for second flight in August. This paper gives a brief introduction to the SIR-CED program. The SIR-CED package consists of: a Teachers´ Resource Guide (180 pages); presentation materials; lesson guides, including activities for students; a CD-ROM containing radar images, shuttle hand-held photographs taken by the astronauts, digitized location and topographic maps, ground photos, easy-to-use software for image display and analysis on Macintosh, SUN, and IBM PC computers; documentation; a selection of videos about imaging radar; and teacher workshops for training. The Teachers´ Resource Guide contains a basic introduction to NASA´s Mission to Planet Earth, how imaging radar and SIR-C fit into that program and how they work, and how scientists use imaging radar data in their studies of the Earth´s environment. Also included in the package are easy-to-use software to display the images provided. The comprehensive data set incorporated into the SIR-CED CD-ROM may also be useful for some engineers and scientists, who wish to explore the potential of radar observation