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For the past year, Somesh Kumar has been working with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) on a cutting edge project that offers to bring outer space into classrooms around the world, virtually. Kumar, a second year computer science master’s student, is working at GSFC through a collaborative agreement with UMBC’s Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center (GEST). Thanks its close proximity and its many collaborative research initiatives with NASA, UMBC–which ranks 16th in the nation for NASA funding—offers students, like Kumar, with the wonderful opportunity to work at NASA.

“VTIE, which stands for Virtual Telescopes in Education , aims to be a complete computer portal for teachers and students interested in astronomy,” says Kumar, describing his master’s project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). “Presently, VTIE contains three interfaces—one for teachers, one for students and one for the general public—that are designed to help comprehensively guide teachers and students through a serious astronomy project. It features many sophisticated tools and services, including a service allowing students to operate a virtual observatory,” Kumar explains.

Designed for middle and high school students, Kumar explains,“VTIE guides students through writing proposals, collecting data and ultimately reporting their results.” It does so through a proposal generation interface, a research and information gathering tool, an image gathering and analysis tool and a step-by-step scientific paper-writing tool. It also provides students with a lab notebook, a dictionary and glossary tools. For teachers, VTIE features tools for reviewing/editing proposals and papers and classroom management tools. For both students and teachers, there is a Message Center to exchange information and view the status of student proposals or papers.

The portal’s most exciting and innovative service for children is its virtual observatory. "The goal of VTIE is to inspire young astronomy students by allowing them to observe celestial objects as if they were professional astronomers," describes Kumar. The portal is being developed by Kumar to allow schoolchildren not only access to professional online databases, but also access to real, live space telescopes to observe their celestial topic of choice. This is being made possible through an agreement with the NASA organization TiE, Telescopes in Education. Students are currently able to remotely control telescopes—distributed all over the world—on classroom computers. “We want the students to experience the thrill of seeing the images, making observations and retrieving the images so they can truly 'own' them,” says Kumar.

Kumar has been working on the VTIE project under the mentorship of Dr. Yelena Yesha, UMBC professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and Dr. Susan Hoban, a NASA senior research scientist. For him, working at NASA has truly been a childhood dream come true. "I always wanted to work at NASA,” he says, “and it’s been exciting and fun!"

While Kumar’s field is computer science, his work on this astronomy-related project has truly inspired him. "It seems like a really glamorous field,” he says “Although I’ve been exposed very little, I'm all ready to go out and buy a telescope myself!"

Kumar recently presented his master’s work at the NASA National Science Foundation—Tennessee State University (NASA-NSF-TSU) Research Symposium. He also presented his work at this year’s Graduate Research Conference (GRC’04) at UMBC. This summer, he will be heading to a VTIE training session for teachers at the NASA National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Greenbank WV.