The Making of

Mike Cripps biog

Graham Colman biog

Baltimore and the Space Telescope Science Institute

Goddard Spaceflight Centre

Graham working on SOS in the Experimenters' Operations Facility at GSFC with ESA SOHO lead Scientist Bernhard Fleck and Science Operations Coordinator Stein Haugan

OK, we admit it; it was our idea.   We first met on a course for UK teachers at Kennedy Space Centre organised by the International Space School Education Trust.   We both felt that space offered lots of exciting learning opportunities for science and maths.   There was stacks of information on the net but it took a great deal of effort to find what we wanted and then it had to be  forged it into a form that we could use in the classroom to teach our curriculum.

The other problem  was how impersonal it all was.  Who were these people working at the cutting edge of exploring the Universe?   And how did they get to be doing these amazing things?

So we zeroed in on what we saw as one of the most exciting areas of space science - the great space based observatories.   The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) produce vast quantities of amazing images and other data that are easily available to students and teachers via the internet.   Mike already had a contact with a SOHO researcher, Helen Mason of the University of Cambridge, as a part of the Royal Society's Partnership Grants scheme.   Helen’s contacts within the international solar science community helped gain support from ESA and NASA SOHO. Some researchers were identified and contacted using the internet. Contact with STScI was made via a number of routes including HST outreach in both ESA and NASA - Google searches are a wonderful thing!

 The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council became the main funder of the project. ESA SOHO and the Norfolk Education Business Exchange boosted the funding to allow the field visit to take place.     From our experience at Kennedy, of meeting scientists face to face and discussing their work, we knew that this type of approach with HST and SOHO scientists could create the type of resources that we wanted to use with our classes.  Something that would allow students to feel that scientists were real people just like them.