Scientists Actively Involved in Education and Public Outreach: A Successful Experience at the MIT Center for Space Research

The Center for Space Research (CSR) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an interdepartmental center that supports research in space science, astronomy and engineering. The Center has been involved in several community outreach initiatives for many years and in 1999 Kathryn Flanagan, research scientist with the Chandra mission, started the CSR Education and Public Outreach Office to coordinate the outreach efforts of the Center. The local but genuine success of these programs prompted a rapid growth in the number and variety of commitments of the E/PO Office that required the development of new initiatives. Today, our main strength consists in the availability of a number of scientists whose overall expertise covers a wide range of space science themes. Our mission is to provide the interface between the CSR scientific community and the formal and informal education communities. Our goal is to offer audiences of any age the opportunity to share in the excitement of the scientific enterprise, and to augment the awareness, in particular for underrepresented groups, of the science resources available to the local community. In this paper we present a sample of initiatives that show our involvement in both formal/informal education and public outreach. Our initiatives rely on the direct participation of CSR scientists, and on the partnership with institutions that provide the expertise in formal and informal education. The initiatives are designed to conform to NASA OSS guidelines for E/PO, but are also flexible enough to meet the needs and requests of the local community. Indeed, an E/PO office with limited personnel like ours is continuously dealing with the tradeoff between quality of the outreach and the number of people reached out to. Small-scale outreach is usually a very effective and successful option: it is also not so intimidating, for both the volunteer speaker and the audience, and allows for individual interaction and follow up. The personal interaction with a scientist is often an event with a long lasting impact on both children and adults. As part of our partnership with the Cambridge Public Schools, we hosted one-day professional development workshops for middle and high school teachers in which several scientists from the HETE-2, Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), and Chandra mission participated. The main goal of the program was to address the concept of science as inquiry by showing “how scientists know what they know.” After forming small groups the teachers were engaged