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EarthKAM Project
Kansai Soka Junior and Senior High School students participated in the seventh session of EarthKAM, a NASA-sponsored space education program for students, in April. They were the only Japanese schools to take part in the project.
Students participating in the EarthKAM program photograph chosen areas of the Earth, using a digital camera mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting at a distance of 400 kilometers above the Earth. Then, using the Internet, they track the ISS's orbit and, in English, send it instructions concerning the requested images, indicating location names, longitudes and latitudes, and their reasons for requesting the photographs. The students then use the photographs in their science and social studies classes and for other school activities.
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An
EarthKAM image of the Greek island of Crete in the
Mediterranean (April 10, 2003) [NASA/UCSD] |
The Soka EarthKAM students have successfully taken some 500 images for such projects as a database for water quality surveillance of lakes and marshes, environmental studies of wetland sites registered under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, inspection of global warming trends, and assessing the advance of the Earth's desertification.
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Students
participating in the EarthKAM program |
The project team, consisting of 183 students from seventh to 12th grades, also plans to coordinate efforts through a worldwide network of schools to launch a "pollution watch" system that will include a database of pollution statistics on the world's lakes and photographs taken by EarthKAM. Students participating in this project said that they now have a keener awareness of the beauty of our planet and the absence of national boundaries when the Earth is viewed from space.
EarthKAM images gathered by Soka students can be viewed on the Kansai Soka schools' home page at:
www.kansai.soka.ed.jp/index2.html
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