The JPL/NASA Mars Pathfinder Mission as an engineering outreach program

Summary form only given. Educational outreach programs have become an important objective for many public organizations. These programs have been developed to educate the public, particularly High School students, about their organizations. NASA has been one of the strongest direct supporters on these programs through their Space Grant Consortium Grants and many fellowship programs. In addition to the large centrally coordinated outreach programs, NASA is also encouraging all individual research centers, such as the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), to operate outreach programs for each project. This paper looks at the outreach program in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology for the Mars Pathfinder Mission that has been in operation since May of 1994 and how it effects Aerospace Engineering. The main objective of the project is to instruct K-12 students in the Atlanta area about Aerospace Engineering and the JPL/NASA Pathfinder Project. A multimedia program has been developed, called SpaceGuide. The original goal of SpaceGuide was to liven up the seminars on the Mars Mission with sound, animations, and computer simulations. A second goal of the multimedia program was to leave something in the schools as a permanent source of information about the Mars Mission.