Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Auld to take part in NASA program
BELLA VISTA — Katherine Auld of Bella Vista, a professor at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, has been selected to participate in the NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors program.
She is the physical science chair at the college and teaches astronomy. She learned about the airborne astronomy ambassadors program through the NASA Community College Network, in which 25 college astronomy instructors across the nation collaborate to build homework and lab assignments using the latest, greatest data from lots of NASA missions and other missions.
She said when she started working at NWACC 10 years ago, the department had interesting labs, but the labs used data from the 1960s.
“It’s cool to show (students) data from the modern era and show them some things we got right back then and some areas where we just keep learning more,” she said.
In the fall, with the NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors program, Auld will fly to Palmdale, Calif., and fly on Sophia flights based out of the NASA Ames Research Center. The flights involve a 737 airplane that has been stripped and equipped with an infrared telescope that is 3 feet in diameter. She said scientists around the country put in requests to have the telescope view different things, such as planets and stars. For a week, she will be going on 11-hour flights above 35,000 feet operating the telescope.
She explained infrared can see through most of the gas, dust and clouds in space so that the infrared telescope finds new information. Infrared also sees further into space than other wavelengths because it can see wavelengths that have stretched out over billions of years that could not be seen with a regular telescope, she said.
Auld will learn to use the telescope and fly on three flights and collect data. In the afternoons before the flights, NASA personnel will show the participants how they are using the information, she said. She will collect data that she can use as a whole unit in class on infrared astronomy, she said. It will be a week of lectures, labs and assignments.
This is only the second year the program has been open to community college teachers, she said. In the past it has been focused on high school and junior high school teachers.
“I’m super excited,” she said, adding she is honored.
“I was one of 24,” she said. “It’s a validation of the work I’ve put in in trying to provide interesting lectures and labs.”
She has lived in Bella Vista since 2011 and Northwest Arkansas since 2000.
“I love living in Bella Vista (and) would not live anywhere else in Northwest Arkansas,” she said. “I love that it feels you’re in the country even though you’re right there next to town.”
Auld is also working on another big project — a nonprofit science center for Northwest Arkansas. She said it will be the “Crystal Bridges for science.” It will have a 2-foot-diameter, 36-foot-long telescope and a planetarium large enough for school trips, she said. She hopes for it to be a field trip destination all the way up to college in addition to being a fun, informal learning place.
The city of Lowell has offered the nonprofit group NWA Space 20 acres in the Kathleen Johnson Memorial Park for $1 per year, and so organizers just have to raise money for the building, she said. Organizers have kicked off a drive for 1,000 people who will donate $5 per month, she said.
To donate to the program go to https://nwa.space or email Auld at katherine.auld@ nwaspace.org.