More than 100 student teams from around the globe will drive their specially crafted lunar rovers through a challenging course of rugged, moon-like terrain at NASA's 17th annual Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Ala., April 9-10.

Some 1,088 high school, college and university students from 20 states and Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Bangladesh, Serbia, India and Romania are expected to participate in the race at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

NASA is announcing a new initiative to launch small cube-shaped satellites for education and not-for-profit organizations. CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called picosatellites, having a size of approximately four inches, a volume of about one quart, and weighing no more than 2.2 pounds.

Image: CU-Boulder Professor Xinlin Li holds a tiny spacecraft that will carry a CU student-built instrument package into space in 2012 to measure the behavior of so-called "killer electrons" in space that can have negative impacts on spacecraft and astronauts. Image courtesy Emilia Reed, CU-Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

NASA has launched a new Web site created specifically for teenagers that provides teens access to current NASA spacecraft data for use in school science projects, allows them to conduct real experiments with NASA scientists, and helps them locate space-related summer internships.

The "Butterflies in Space" experiment by BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado. This experiment was made possible through the support of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) and the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). Larvae and technical assistance provided by Monarch Watch, Butterfly Pavilion, and Clearwater Butterfly.

NSBRI: Join us for daily updates of the STS-129 "Butterflies in Space" experiment, and study butterfly life cycles and behaviors in microgravity and on Earth. Images are downloaded from the International Space Station (ISS) in two batches each day.

Payload Information below

Imagine what NASA could do by adopting this technology for its education and public outreach efforts...