The Port Discovery Children’s Museum in Baltimore will host a NASA Sunday Experiment on Aug. 2, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT. Admission tickets are required for entry to Port Discovery, but the Sunday Experiment activities are then available to all museum visitors, with a focus on school-aged children and their families.
August’s Sunday Experiment will feature activities to help people learn about light and optics. At NASA, we look far, far away to learn about the structure of our universe; we look at our sun and other stars, to understand how stars form and if they have planets that could support life; and we look at our own home, Earth, to study our changing world. Much of what we know about these things comes from light traveling from these objects to our optical instruments.
Hands-on activities will teach children how instruments built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, use optics to unlock the secrets carried in this light. These instruments help us answer the important questions about an object: “what does it look like?” (with imagers that operate using reflection and refraction), “what is it made of?” (with spectrometers, which spread light into a rainbow using dispersion and diffraction), and “what can we learn about the structure?” (with polarimeters, measuring the light’s polarization).
For more information on Sunday Experiment, please call Amanda Harvey at 301-286-6242 or visit: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/visitor/events/index.html.
For more information on the Port Discovery Children’s Museum and directions, visit: www.portdiscovery.org.
Amanda Harvey
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
amanda.c.harvey@nasa.gov
301-286-6242