Spaceward Bound: A Field School for Exploration and Science Training of the Next Generation

Spaceward Bound is an educational program organized at NASA Ames in partnership with The Mars Society, and funded by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) at NASA Headquarters. The focus of Spaceward Bound is to train the next generation of space explorers by inviting university students and K-12 teachers to participate in the exploration of scientifically interesting but remote and extreme environments on Earth as analogs for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

One focus of the expeditions is to involve teachers in authentic fieldwork so that they can bring the experience back to their classroom and assist in the development of curriculum related to human exploration of remote and extreme environments. This is accomplished by pairing teachers with science teams during one-week expeditions in the Atacama and Mojave Deserts. Teachers participated in the entire field science process from defining the goals, collecting the data, to analyzing the results.

Another focus of the expeditions is to enable students at the upper undergraduate and graduate level (including teachers) to participate as crew members in two-week long immersive full-scale simulations of living and working on the Moon and Mars at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), established and operated by The Mars Society. An interdisciplinary curriculum was created to teach the next generation of explorers essential field skills. This curriculum includes geology field and laboratory techniques, field documentation methodologies, space suit use, remote sensing data interpretation, and communications in addition to other skills required by an interdisciplinary explorer. We discuss results and future plans of the Spaceward Bound program.

We would like to thank the crewmembers and scientists from each Spaceward Bound mission. Liza Coe and the NASA Ames education team, Paul Graham, Tony Muscatello, and Robert Zubrin, and the ESMD at NASA Headquarters for funding the Spaceward Bound program.