Students to exhibit GRAIL MoonKAM images

Forward view from a MoonKAM camera on-board GRAIL Ebb looks down into 29.6 kilometer Titov and south-southwestward over surrounding floor of Mare Moscoviense, in the northern lunar farside. MoonKam image 8108, Robert McCall School, May 19, 2012 [NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS].

Reporters have been invited to an exhibit of student-directed MoonKam images of the lunar surface captured by NASA's GRAIL twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, Friday, June 1, from 10 am until Noon, EDT, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC.

The event will showcase the MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) education and public outreach project flying in lunar orbit on the GRAIL spacecraft. 

MoonKAM provides students around the world with an opportunity to identify and choose images of the moon's surface using small cameras aboard NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. Thousands of images of lunar targets have been selected by fifth to eighth-grade students since.the GRAIL twins arrived in lunar orbit with the New Year.

MoonKAM is operated by Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego. 

Sally Ride, CEO of the science education company (and America's first woman in space) will host the event and provide opening remarks. Event presenters include NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver and GRAIL principal investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, it was announced earlier this week that the primary science mission of the GRAIL mission was completed ahead of schedule. An extended mission will continue at least through December.