ANS holds launch party for virtual field trip to space

Details: The virtual field trip is part of the Navigating Nuclear: Energizing Our World program, a partnership between ANS, Discovery Education, and the U.S. Department of Energy that has reached more than 1.5 million K-12 students.

“I’m especially appreciative of these curriculum materials having been a K-12 science teacher myself in a previous life,” ANS President Mary Lou Dunzik-Gougar said in her opening remarks during the watch party. “I’ve been in the K-12 classroom, and I recognize the importance of roles that teachers play in students’ lives and how hard it can be as a K-12 teacher to be an expert in all these different fields. So, I feel that these curriculum materials are so valuable for that reason.”

Launch party: Following a viewing of the video, Dunzik-Gougar was joined by several special guests, including the key participants in Nuclear Frontiers, for a brief Q&A.

Panelists included Franklin Chang-Diaz, NASA Hall of Fame astronaut and chief executive officer at Ad Astra Rocket Company; Candace Davison, assistant director for Education and Outreach in the Radiation Science and Engineering Center at Penn State University; Melinda Higgins, of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy; and David Poston, leader of the compact fission reactor design team at Los Alamos National Laboratory.