Fourth grade students from Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana won the contest to rename two NASA spacecrafts. Their prize? The right to choose which parts of the moon the NASA ships would photograph. The images they chose have now been made available by the space agency.
In a perfect storm of bureaucratic literalism and mythopoetic overstatement, the two crafts were formerly called "Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) A and B." The students won the right to direct the craft's MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students, seriously?) to photograph their choice by slightly purging NASA of its endemic etymological turgidity. The kids' entry for the crafts' new names: Ebb and Flow.
GRAIL was NASA's first planetary mission devoted to education and is directed by the first American woman in space, Sally Ride. The MoonKAM will be used by 2,700 schools in 52 countries over the course of the mission. NASA hopes direct control over a spacecraft (or a sizable chunk of it anyway—the camera) will, in the minds of a generation of school children, turn the moon from an abstraction into something they feel invested in.
"What might seem like just a cool activity for these kids may very well have a profound impact on their futures," Ride said in NASA's announcement. "The students really are excited about MoonKAM, and that translates into an excitement about science and engineering."
GRAIL launched in September of last year. Previously, it was best known for taking the first video of the far side of the moon, the side always facing away from Earth.
Listing image by Photograph by NASA
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