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Ask an Astrophysicist

Guideline for Teachers

Welcome to the "Ask an Astrophysicist" service!

We are glad that you and your class are visiting our site. We would like to ask you not to give a class an assignment asking them to 'send a question to "Ask an Astrophysicist" ', though. Here are the reasons why:

  • We are a small group of volunteers. Many of us are using our personal time to answer these questions. A set of 20 questions from a class, all arriving within a few hours, can easily overwhelm our capacity.
  • We think it's better to let your student explore our organized presentations --- StarChild for primary school students and Imagine the Universe! for middle and high school students. Both sites are linked to specific (US) educational standards (StarChild is written by teachers). For example, you might tell a class of 4th graders to each nominate a favorite planet, and find out all she/he can from the StarChild site. If your students, having read sections of our sites, come up with questions, then we do welcome them. On the other hand, the answer to many of the questions that they come up with 'cold', is to say 'read our site'.

In addition, we would like to reiterate that we only represent a small section of NASA --- in particular, we are not the best experts on human space exploration. For information on who we are and what our part is within NASA, please read our Who Are We? page.

Thanks again for visiting our site; we hope it helps your students to learn about the Universe.