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The TIE program has brought on partnerships with Universities, Planetaria, and Museums across the USA. Hundreds of thousands
of K-14 students have remotely controlled the telescopes and CCD cameras over the last 9 years, with an overall impact of
the program being able to be measured by following where these students have continued their education. An example of this
is Trinity School in Manhattan, New York. This school focused on turning out Ivy League candidates in the area of law,
public administration and business. Since they began using the TIE program over nine years ago, they have made astronomy a
legitimate part of their curricula, and they are now sending an increasing number of students to schools such as Caltech
and MIT.
One of the partnerships that has evolved from the concept of TIE is called Virtual TIE (VTIE), which is a NSF funded
project under the guidance of Dr Susan Hoban (an employee of NASA Goddard). This software will allow online scheduling of a
large pool of telescopes around the world. It will also provide guidance to students and educators in the development of
science note books all the way through the publication of the resulting research data. There is a significant list of tools
that will allow students and educators to develop meaningful science results.
During the last nine years, there have been many educational accomplishments, including:
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A group of students in Japan, the West Coast (USA) and the East Coast (USA) simultaneously linked to a telescope on Mount
Wilson, collected data, and shared the data with a professor at the University of Maryland through a NASA/Japan sponsored
program to demonstrate OC-3 data rate connectivity via satellite (the Trans Pacific Experiment).
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A young female 8th grade student took first place in the Los Angeles county science fair by making photometric
measurements of Vesta. She was able to demonstrate the rotational rate clearly with her light curves.
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A class re-discovered a long period variable star that had not made it into the catalogs, whilst another student discovered
a variable star as a summer project.
The primary focus of the NTQO is to capture the imagination of the innovators of tomorrow - the students of today - by
providing educators and students with easy access to research-quality telescopes and CCD cameras. Educational packages have
been developed already by the TIE program, and can be found at their website under
Online Resources. Alternately, you can download
the workbook in PDF format here.
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