![]() NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission is a small satellite that will seek out signs of frost in deep, permanently shadowed craters around the Moon’s south pole. › Educators, get the lesson here! Lunar Logic Read on to learn more about the science and engineering behind the problems or click the link below to jump right into the challenge. This ninth installment of the NASA Pi Day Challenge includes four brain-busters that get students using pi to measure frost deep within craters on the Moon, estimate the density of Mars’ core, calculate the water output from a dam to assess its potential environmental impact, and find how far a planet-hunting satellite needs to travel to send data back to Earth. ![]() And that's precisely what the NASA Pi Day Challenge is all about! The Science Behind the 2022 NASA Pi Day Challenge House of Representatives passed a resolution officially designating March 14 as Pi Day and encouraging teachers and students to celebrate the day with activities that teach students about pi. In the United States, March 14 can be written as 3.14, which is why that date was chosen for celebrating all things pi. Architects use pi when designing bridges or buildings with arches electricians use pi when calculating the conductance of wire and you might even want to use pi to figure out how much frozen goodness you are getting in your ice cream cone. Since pi can be used to find the area or circumference of round objects and the volume or surface area of shapes like cylinders, cones, and spheres, it is useful in all sorts of ways. But pi isn’t just used for exploring the cosmos. Here at NASA, we use pi to understand how much signal we can receive from a distant spacecraft, to calculate the rotation speed of a Mars helicopter blade, and to collect asteroid samples. But you might be surprised to learn that for space exploration, NASA uses far fewer digits of pi. In 2021, a supercomputer calculated pi to more than 62 trillion digits. Because pi is an irrational number, its decimal representation goes on forever and never repeats. Credits: NASA | + Expand image How It Worksĭividing any circle’s circumference by its diameter gives you an answer of pi, which is usually rounded to 3.14. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.Illustration of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. George Ricker of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Watch to review some of TESS’s most interesting discoveries so far. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has completed its two-year primary mission and is continuing its search for new worlds.
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