Education: Mission

In 1958, Congress passed the Space Act mandating that NASA disseminate broadly the knowledge it generates. On these web pages, the CloudSat satellite mission strives to meet the following public engagement goals and objectives:

The first goal is to engage the public in Earth science exploration and discovery by increasing public awareness of NASAs key role in Earth science through CloudSats accomplishments and relevance by providing timely and accessible information. To fulfill this goal, our aim is to provide and disseminate compelling CloudSat public engagement materials and to improve the capacity of other communicators of Earth science such as teachers to deliver engaging NASA content. An additional objective is to enable CloudSat science team members to participate in public engagement activities.

Another goal is to inspire and motivate students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by supporting improvements in Earth science education using CloudSat results. Through the NASA-sponsored GLOBE Program, students can collect and enter data that will be compared to CloudSat measurements. CloudSat also seeks to contribute Earth science learning opportunities to lifelong learners. We seek to share the results of CloudSats scientific research mission to improve our understanding of clouds and global climate change with and expand the base of scientifically literate citizens.

So help us reveal the inner secrets of clouds by exploring the stories, games and links found throughout the Education web pages.