Discovering Antarctica: The Landsat Image Mosaic (LIMA)

1. Motivation The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is the first-ever true-color high-resolution satellite view of the Antarctic continent enabling everyone to see Antarctica as it appears in real life. This web site is designed as part of the International Polar Year to familiarize people with Antarctica, to explore the richness of its features, to learn about why Antarctica matters to us all, and to explain and demonstrate how scientists use satellite imagery to study the continent. This site is a two-year project. We plan to periodically add content. Your feedback is sought to help us in improving the site. • Objectives • you had became the scientists who studied the features on Antarctica, as never seen before; • using a major scientific tool: curiosity, you had developed a research question and argue the value of studying a feature based on this new view of Antarctica; • helping us to acquaint with their scientific interests and to give us some insight into what it takes to be a scientist. Participants: • This project involved students from 10th D class from “Tudor Vianu” National High School of Computer Science.

2. Proposals for Spring 2008 NASA Quest Challenge!

3. Scientists’ appreciationin a Webcast for the Lima Quest Challenge • Tom Wagner (Ph.D. Program Director Antarctic Earth SciencesNational Science Foundation) said: “Well, we have another proposal from a different classroom belonging to miss Stoica in Romania. Her class 9, another computer science class at the national high school. Ginny, what feedback can you offer on proposal number four? • Ginny Catania (Research Scientist University of Texas Austin’s Institute for Geophysics) said: “I thought this was an interesting proposal. Their land set image that they show in the glacier is really beautiful. They ask a couple of interesting questions in their proposal including some stuff about glacial geology and how did it get formed. I would encourage them to take it further and think about what kind of questions they want to answer by going to this place or looking at this place. One thing I thought that was really interesting was their idea about biology and species diversity. I thought it was an interesting idea the look at diversity from an nunatak perspective in Antarctica. I don't think that's very well explored in Antarctica. I thought that was great.. And so from a glacial biology perspective it was an interesting proposal.

4. Being asked why is Antarctica important to NASA, scientists gave a number of quite interesting reasons such as: using Antarctica as a place to test instruments and ideas for missions planned for exploring other planets and moons, NASA astronauts even train there sometimes. Also they said that: ”Ms. Stoica's class (from Romania): Ms. Stoica, I want to complement you on your wonderful classes.  Your students are among the very best that competed in the LIMA Challenge.  Congratulations.  I’m sure they think you are a terrific teacher.  I certainly think so!”. This is a part of the webcast. You can find out more visiting the related link: http://quest.nasa.gov/challenges/lima/webcast_052908.html For further details about Antarctica and the quest please visit: http://lima.nasa.gov/